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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap. ...t:.f?r./.3A 
She/f 1_ J JfJ- 




UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 



FROUDACITY. 



" Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures." 

" Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men the things that are 
not ? " — Shakespeare. 



FROUDACITY 



WEST INDIAN FABLES BY JAMES 
ANTHONY FROUDE 



EXPLAINED BY 

j. j/thomas 

AUTHOR OF 

" The Creole Grammar" 




PHILADELPHIA 

GEBBIE AND COMPANY 

1890 



tJ 






VD 



Preface. 



Last year had well advanced towards its 
middle — in fact it was already April, 1888 — 
before Mr. Froude's book of travels in the 
West Indies became known and generally 
accessible to readers in those Colonies. 

My perusal of it in Grenada about the period 
above mentioned disclosed, thinly draped with 
rhetorical flowers, the dark outlines of a scheme 
to thwart political aspiration in the Antilles. 
That project is sought to be realized by de- 
terring the home authorities from granting an 
elective local legislature, however restricted in 
character, to any of the Colonies not yet en- 
joying such an advantage. An argument based 
on the composition of the inhabitants of those 
Colonies is confidently relied upon to confirm 
the inexorable mood of Downing Street. 



6 PREFACE. 

Over-large and ever-increasing, — so runs the 
argument, — the African element in the popula- 
tion of the West Indies is, from its past history 
and its actual tendencies, a standing menace 
to the continuance of civilization and religion. 
An immediate catastrophe, social, political, and 
moral, would most assuredly be brought about 
by the granting of full elective rights to de- 
pendencies thus inhabited. Enlightened states- 
manship should at once perceive the immense 
benefit that would ultimately result from such 
refusal of the franchise. The cardinal recommen- 
dation of that refusal is that it would avert de- 
finitively the political domination of the Blacks, 
which must inevitably be the outcome of any 
concession of the modicum of right so earnestly 
desired. The exclusion of the Negro vote 
being inexpedient, if not impossible, the exercise 
of electoral powers by the Blacks must lead to 
their returning candidates of their own race to 
the local legislatures, and that, too, in numbers 
preponderating according to the majority of the 
Negro electors. The Negro legislators thus 
supreme in the councils of the Colonies would 
straightway proceed to pass vindictive and 
retaliatory laws against their white fellow- 



PREFACE. 7 

colonists. For it is only fifty years since 
the White man and the Black man stood in 
the reciprocal relations of master and slave. 
Whilst those relations subsisted, the white 
masters inflicted, and the black slaves had to 
endure, the hideous atrocities that are in- 
separable from the system of slavery. Since 
Emancipation, the enormous strides made in 
self-advancement by the ex-slaves have only had 
the effect of provoking a resentful uneasiness in 
the bosoms of the ex-masters. The former 
bondsmen, on their side, and like their brethren 
of Hayti, are eaten up with implacable, 
blood-thirsty rancour against their former 
lords and owners. The annals of Hayti form 
quite a cabinet of political and social object- 
lessons which, in the eyes of British statesmen, 
should be invaluable in showing the true 
method of dealing with Ethiopic subjects of the 
Crown. The Negro race in Hayti, in order to 
obtain and to guard what it calls its freedom, 
has outraged every humane instinct and falsi- 
fied every benevolent hope. The slave-owners 
there had not been a whit more cruel than 
slave-owners in the other islands. But, in 
spite of this, how ferocious, how sanguinary, 



8 PREFACE. 

how relentless against them has the vengeance 
of the Blacks been in their hour of mastery ! 
A century has passed away since then, and, not- 
withstanding that, the hatred of Whites still 
rankles in their souls, and is cherished and 
yielded to as a national creed and guide of 
conduct. Colonial administrators of the mighty 
British Empire, the lesson which History has 
taught and yet continues to teach you in Hayti 
as to the best mode of dealing with your 
Ethiopic colonists lies patent, blood-stained and 
terrible before you, and should be taken defini- 
tively to heart. But if you are willing that 
Civilization and Religion — in short, all the 
highest developments of individual and social 
life — should at once be swept away by a 
desolating vandalism of African birth ; if you 
do not recoil from the blood-guiltiness that 
would stain your consciences through the mas- 
sacre of our fellow-countrymen in the West 
Indies, on account of their race, complexion and 
enlightenment ; finally, if you desire those 
modern Hesperides to revert into primeval 
jungle, horrent lairs wherein the Blacks, who, 
but a short while before, had been ostensibly 
civilized, shall be revellers, as high-priests and 



PREFACE. 9 

devotees, in orgies of devil-worship, cannibalism, 
and obeah — dare to give the franchise to those 
West Indian Colonies, and then rue the conse- 
quences of your infatuation ! . . . 

Alas, if the foregoing summary of the ghastly 
imaginings of Mr. Froude were true, in what a 
fool's paradise had the wisest and best amongst 
us been living, moving, and having our being ! 
Up to the date of the suggestion by him as 
above of the alleged facts and possibilities of 
West Indian life, we had believed (even grant- 
ing the correctness of his gloomy account of 
the past and present positions of the two races) 
that to no well-thinking West Indian White, 
whose ancestors may have, innocently or culp- 
ably, participated in the gains as well as the 
guilt of slavery, would the remembrance of its 
palmy days be otherwise than one of regret. 
We Negroes, on the other hand, after a lapse 
of time extending over nearly two generations, 
could be indebted only to precarious tradition 
or scarcely accessible documents for any know- 
ledge we might chance upon of the sufferings 
endured in these Islands of the West by 
those of our race who have gone before us. 
Death, with undiscriminating hand, had gathered 



io PREFACE, 

in the human harvest of masters and slaves 
alike, according to or out of the normal laws of 
nature ; while Time had been letting down on 
the stage of our existence drop-scene after drop- 
scene of years, to the number of something like 
fifty, which had been curtaining off the tragic 
incidents of the past from the peaceful activities 
of the present. Being thus circumstanced, 
thought we, what rational elements of mutual 
hatred should now continue to exist in the 
bosoms of the two races ? 

With regard to the perpetual reference to 
Hayti, because of our oneness with its inhabi- 
tants in origin and complexion, as a criterion 
for the exact forecast of our future conduct 
under given circumstances, this appeared to us, 
looking at actual facts, perversity gone wild in 
the manufacture of analogies. The founders 
of the Black Republic, we had all along under- 
stood, were not in any sense whatever equipped, 
as Mr. Froude assures us they were, when 
starting on their self-governing career, with the 
civil and intellectual advantages that had been 
transplanted from Europe. On the contrary, 
we had been taught to regard them as most 
unfortunate in the circumstances under which 



PREFACE. ii 

they so gloriously conquered their merited free- 
dom. We saw them free, but perfectly illiterate 
barbarians, impotent to use the intellectual re- 
sources of which their valour had made them 
possessors, in the shape of books on the spirit 
and technical details of a highly developed 
national existence. We had learnt also, until 
this new interpreter of history had contradicted 
the accepted record, that the continued failure 
of Hayti to realize the dreams of Toussaint was 
due to the fatal want of confidence subsisting 
between the fairer and darker sections of the 
inhabitants, which had its sinister and disas- 
trous origin in the action of the Mulattoes in 
attempting to secure freedom for themselves, 
in conjunction with the Whites, at the sacrifice 
of their darker-hued kinsmen. Finally, it had 
been explained to us that the remembrance of 
this abnormal treason had been underlying and 
perniciously influencing the whole course of 
Haytian national history. All this established 
knowledge we are called upon to throw over- 
board, and accept the baseless assertions of 
this conjuror-up of inconceivable fables ! He 
calls upon us to believe that, in spite of being 
free, educated, progressive, and at peace with 



i2 PREFACE. 

all men, we West Indian Blacks, were we ever 
to become constitutionally dominant in our 
native islands, would emulate in savagery 
our Haytian fellow- Blacks who, at the time 
of retaliating upon their actual masters, were 
tortured slaves, bleeding and rendered desperate 
under the oppressors' lash — and all this simply 
and merely because of the sameness of our 
ancestry and the colour of our skin ! One 
would have thought that Liberia would have 
been a fitter standard of comparison in respect 
of a coloured population starting a national life, 
really and truly equipped with the requisites 
and essentials of civilized existence. But such a 
reference would have been fatal to Mr. Froude's 
object : the annals of Liberia being a persistent 
refutation of the old pro-slavery prophecies 
which our author so feelingly rehearses. 

Let us revert, however, to Grenada and the 
newly-published " Bow of Ulysses," which had 
come into my hands in April, 1888. 

It seemed to me, on reading that book, and 
deducing therefrom the foregoing essential 
summary, that a critic would have little more to 
do, in order to effectually exorcise this negro- 
phobic political hobgoblin, than to appeal to 



PREFACE. 13 

impartial history, as well as to common sense, 
in its application to human nature in general, 
and to the actual facts of West Indian life in 
particular. 

History, as against the hard and fast White- 
master and Black-slave theory so recklessly 
invented and confidently built upon by Mr. 
Froude, would show incontestably — (a) that 
for upwards of two hundred years before the 
Negro Emancipation, in 1838, there had never 
existed in one of those then British Colonies, 
which had been originally discovered and settled 
for Spain by the great Columbus or by his 
successors, the Conquist adores, any prohibition 
whatsoever, on the ground of race or colour, 
against the owning of slaves by any free person 
possessing the necessary means, and desirous of 
doing so ; (b) that, as a consequence of this non- 
restriction, and from causes notoriously his- 
torical, numbers of blacks, half-breeds, and other 
non-Europeans, besides such of them as had 
become possessed of their " property" by in- 
heritance, availed themselves of this virtual 
license, and in course of time constituted a very 
considerable proportion of the slave-holding 
section of those communities ; (c) that these 



i 4 PREFACE. 

dusky plantation-owners enjoyed and used in 
every possible sense the identical rights and 
privileges which were enjoyed and used by 
their pure-blooded Caucasian brother-slave- 
owners. The above statements are attested 
by written documents, oral tradition, and, better 
still perhaps, by the living presence in those 
islands of numerous lineal representatives of 
those once opulent and flourishing non- 
European planter-families. 

Common sense, here stepping in, must, from 
the above data, deduce some such conclusions 
as the following. First that, on the hypothesis 
that the slaves who were freed in 1838 — 
full fifty years ago — were all on an average 
fifteen years old, those vengeful ex-slaves of 
to-day will be all men of sixty-five years of age ; 
and, allowing for the delay in getting the fran- 
chise, somewhat further advanced towards the 
human life-term of threescore and ten years. 
Again, in order to organize and carry out any 
scheme of legislative and social retaliation of the 
kind set forth in the " Bow of Ulysses," there 
must be (which unquestionably there is not) a 
considerable, well-educated, and very influential 
number surviving of those who had actually 



PREFACE. 15 

been in bondage. Moreover, the vengeance of 
these people (also assuming the foregoing non- 
existent condition) would have, in case of 
opportunity, to wreak itself far more largely and 
vigorously upon members of their own race than 
upon Whites, seeing that the increase of the 
Blacks, as correctly represented in the " Bow of 
Ulysses," is just as rapid as the diminution of 
the White population. And therefore, Mr. 
Froude's " Danger-to-the-Whites " cry in sup- 
port of his anti-reform manifesto would not 
appear, after all, to be quite so justifiable as he 
possibly thinks. 

Feeling keenly that something in the shape 
of the foregoing programme might be success- 
fully worked up for a public defence of the 
maligned people, I disregarded the bodily and 
mental obstacles that have beset and clouded 
my career during the last twelve years, and 
cheerfully undertook the task, stimulated thereto 
by what I thought weighty considerations. I 
saw that no representative of Her Majesty's 
Ethiopic West Indian subjects cared to come 
forward to perform this work in the more 
permanent shape that I felt to be not only 
desirable but essential for our self-vindication. 



1 6 PREFACE. 

I also realized the fact that the " Bow of 
Ulysses " was not likely to have the same 
ephemeral existence and effect as the newspaper 
and other periodical discussions of its contents, 
which had poured from the press in Great 
Britain, the United States, and very notably, of 
course, in all the English Colonies of the 
Western Hemisphere. In the West Indian 
papers the best writers of our race had written 
masterly refutations, but it was clear how 
difficult the task would be in future to procure 
and refer to them whenever occasion should 
require. Such productions, however, fully satis- 
fied those qualified men of our people, because 
they were legitimately convinced (even as I 
myself am convinced) that the political destinies 
of the people of colour could not run one tittle of 
risk from anything that it pleased Mr. Froude 
to write or say on the subject. But, meditating 
further on the question, the reflection forced it- 
self upon me that, beyond the mere political 
personages in the circle more directly addressed 
by Mr. Froude's volume, there were individuals 
whose influence or possible sympathy we could 
not afford to disregard, or to esteem lightly. So 
I deemed it right and a patriotic duty to attempt 



PREFACE. 17 

the enterprise myself, in obedience to the above 
stated motives. 

At this point I must pause to express on be- 
half of the entire coloured population of the 
West Indies our most heartfelt acknowledg- 
ments to Mr. C. Salmon for the luminous and 
effective vindication of us, in his volume on 
"West Indian Confederation," against Mr. 
Froude's libels. The service thus rendered by 
Mr. Salmon possesses a double significance 
and value in my estimation. In the first place, 
as being the work of a European of high 
position, quite independent of us (who testifies 
concerning Negroes, not through having gazed 
at them from balconies, decks of steamers, or 
the seats of moving carriages, but from actual 
and long personal intercourse with them, which 
the internal evidence of his book plainly proves 
to have been as sympathetic as it was familiar), 
and, secondly, as the work of an individual 
entirely outside of our race, it has been grate- 
fully accepted by myself as an incentive to self- 
help, on the same more formal and permanent 
lines, in a matter so important to the status 
which we can justly claim as a progressive 
law-abiding, and self-respecting section of Her 
Majesty's liege subjects. 



18 PREFACE, 

It behoves me now to say a few words re- 
specting this book as a mere literary production. 

Alexander Pope, who, next to Shakespeare 
and perhaps Butler, was the most copious con- 
tributor to the current stock of English maxims, 
says : 

" True ease in writing comes from Art, not Chance, 
As those move easiest who have learnt to dance." 

A whole dozen years of bodily sickness and 
mental tribulation have not been conducive to 
that regularity of practice in composition which 
alone can ensure the " true ease " spoken of by 
the poet ; and therefore is it that my style leaves 
so much to be desired, and exhibits, perhaps, 
still more to be pardoned. Happily, a quarrel 
such as ours with the author of " The English 
in the West Indies" cannot be finally or even 
approximately settled on the score of superior 
literary competency, whether of aggressor or de- 
fender. I feel free to ignore whatever verdict 
might be grounded on a consideration so purely 
artificial. There ought to be enough, if not 
in these pages, at any rate in whatever else I 
have heretofore published, that should prove 
me not so hopelessly stupid and wanting in 



PREFACE. 



<9 



self-respect, as would be implied by my under- 
taking a contest in artistic phrase-weaving with 
one who, even among the foremost of his 
literary countrymen, is confessedly a master in 
that craft. The judges to whom I do submit 
our case are those Englishmen and others 
whose conscience blends with their judgment, 
and who determine such questions as this on 
their essential rightness which has claim to the 
first and decisive consideration. For much that 
is irregular in the arrangement and sequence of 
the subject-matter, some blame fairly attaches to 
our assailant. The erratic manner in which he 
launches his injurious statements against the 
hapless Blacks, even in the course of passages 
which no more led up to them than to any 
other section of mankind, is a very notable 
feature of his anti-Negro production. As he 
frequently repeats, very often with cynical 
aggravations, his charges and sinister pro- 
phecies against the sable objects of his aversion, 
I could see no other course open to me than to 
take him up on the points whereto I demurred, 
exactly how, when, and where I found them. 

My purpose could not be attained up without 
direct mention of, or reference to, certain public 



20 PREFACE. 

employes in the Colonies whose official conduct 
has often been the subject of criticism in the 
public press of the West Indies. Though fully 
aware that such criticism has on many occasions 
been much more severe than my own strictures, 
yet, it being possible that some special responsi- 
bility may attach to what I here reproduce in a 
more permanent shape, I most cheerfully accept, 
in the interests of public justice, any consequence 
which may result. 

A remark or two concerning the publication 
of this rejoinder. It has been hinted to me that 
the issue of it has been too long delayed to 
secure for it any attention in England, owing 
to the fact that the West Indies are but little 
known, and of less interest, to the generality of 
English readers. Whilst admitting, as in duty 
bound, the possible correctness of this fore- 
cast, and regretting the oft-recurring hindrances 
which occasioned such frequent and, some- 
times, long suspension of my labour ; and 
noting, too, the additional delay caused through 
my unacquaintance with English publishing 
usages, I must, notwithstanding, plead guilty 
to a lurking hope that some small fraction 
of Mr. Froude's readers will yet be found, 



PREFACE. 21 

whose interest in the West Indies will be 
temporarily revived on behalf of this essay, 
owing to its direct bearing on Mr. Froude and 
his statements relative to these Islands, con 
tained in his recent book of travels in them. 
This I am led to hope will be more particularly 
the case when it is borne in mind that the 
rejoinder has been attempted by a member of 
that very same race which he has, with such 
eloquent recklessness of all moral considerations, 
held up to public contempt and disfavour. In 
short, I can scarcely permit myself to believe it 
possible that concern regarding a popular author, 
on his being questioned by an adverse critic 
of however restricted powers, can be so utterly 
dead within a twelvemonth as to be incapable 
of rekindling. Mr. Froude's " Oceana," which 
had been published long before its author 
voyaged to the West Indies, in order to treat 
the Queen's subjects there in the same more 
than questionable fashion as that in which he 
had treated those of the Southern Hemisphere, 
had what was in the main a formal rejoinder 
to its misrepresentations published only three 
months ago in this city. I venture to believe 
that no serious work in defence of an impor- 



22 PREFACE. 

tant cause or community can lose much, if 
anything, of its intrinsic value through some 
delay in its issue ; especially when written in the 
vindication of Truth, whose eternal principles 
are beyond and above the influence of time and 
its changes. 

At any rate, this attempt to answer some 
of Mr. Froude's main allegations against the 
people of the West Indies cannot fail to be 
of grave importance and lively interest to the 
inhabitants of those Colonies. In this opinion 
I am happy in being able to record the full con- 
currence of a numerous and influential body of 
my fellow- West Indians, men of various races, 
but united in detestation of falsehood and in- 
justice. 

J- J- T. 

London, June, 1889. 



CojNTEJMTg. 



BOOK I. 



Introduction — 
Voyage Out 
Barbados 
St. Vincent 
Grenada ... 



BOOK II. 

Trinidad 

Reform in Trinidad 

Negro Felicity in the West Indies 



34 
4i 
44 
48 



53 
55 
81 



BOOK III. 



Social Revolution 
West Indian Confederation. 
The Negro as a Worker 
Religion for Negroes 



113 

i75 
201 
207 



BOOK IV. 



Historical Summary 



233 



BOOK I. 



INTRODUCTION, 



Like the ancient hero, one of whose warlike 
equipments furnishes the complementary title 
of his book, the author of " The English in the 
West Indies ; or, The Bow of Ulysses," sallied 
forth from his home to study, if not cities, at 
least men (especially black men), and their 
manners in the British Antilles. 

James Anthony Froude is, beyond any doubt 
whatever, a very considerable figure in modern 
English literature. It has, however, for some 
time ceased to be a question whether his ac- 
ceptability, to the extent which it reaches, has 
not been due rather to the verbal attractiveness 
than to the intrinsic value and trustworthiness 
of his opinions and teachings. In fact, so far 
as a judgment can be formed from examined 
specimens of his writings, it appears that our 



28 FROUDACITY. 

author is the bond-slave of his own phrases. 
To secure an artistic perfection of style, he dis- 
regards all obstacles, not only those presented 
by the requirements of verity, but such as 
spring from any other kind of consideration 
whatsoever. The doubt may safely be enter- 
tained whether, among modern British men 
of letters, there be one of equal capability who, 
in the interest of the happiness of his sentences, 
so cynically sacrifices what is due not only to 
himself as a public instructor, but also to that 
public whom he professes to instruct. Yet, as 
the too evident plaything of an over-permeable 
moral constitution, he might set up some plea in 
explanation of his ethical vagaries. He might 
urge, for instance, that the high culture of which 
his books are all so redolent has utterly failed 
to imbue him with the nil admirari sentiment, 
which Horace commends as the sole specific 
for making men happy and keeping them so. 
For, as a matter of fact, and with special 
reference to the work we have undertaken to 
discuss, Mr. Froude, though cynical in his 
general utterances regarding Negroes — of the 
male sex, be it noted — is, in the main, all ex- 
travagance and self-abandonment whenever he 



INTRODUCTION. 29 

brings an object of his arbitrary likes or dislikes 
under discussion. At such times he is no 
observer, much less worshipper, of proportion 
in his delineations. Thorough-paced, scarcely 
controllable, his enthusiasm for or against ad- 
mits no degree in its expression, save and 
except the superlative. Hence Mr. Froude's 
statement of facts or description of phenomena, 
whenever his feelings are enlisted either way, 
must be taken with the proverbial "grain of salt" 
by all when enjoying the luxury of perusing his 
books. So complete is his self-identification 
with the sect or individual for the time being- en- 
grossing his sympathy, that even their personal 
antipathies are made his own ; and the hostile 
language, often exaggerated and unjust, in 
which those antipathies find vent, secures in 
his more chastened mode of utterance an exact 
reproduction none the less injurious because 
divested of grossness. 

Of this special phase of self-manifestation 
a typical instance is afforded at page 164, 
under the heading of " Dominica," in a pas- 
sage which at once embraces and accentuates 
the whole spirit and method of the work. 
To a eulogium of the professional skill and sue- 



30 FROUDACITY. 

cessful agricultural enterprise of Dr. Nichol, 
a medical officer of that Colony, with whom he 
became acquainted for the first time during his 
short stay there, our author travels out of his 
way to tack on a gratuitous and pointless sneer 
at the educational competency of all the elected 
members of the island legislature, among whom, 
he tells us 5 the worthy doctor had often tried 
in vain to obtain a place. His want of 
success, our author informs his readers, was 
brought about through Dr. Nichol "being the 
only man in the Colony of superior attainments." 
Persons acquainted with the stormy politics of 
that lovely little island do not require to be 
informed that the bitterest animosity had for 
years been raging between Dr. Nichol and 
some of the elected members — a fact which 
our author chose characteristically to regard as 
justifying an onslaught by himself on the whole 
of that section of which the foes of his new 
friend formed a prominent part. 

Swayed by the above specified motives, our 
author also manages to see much that is, and 
always has been, invisible to mortal eye, and 
to fail to hear what is audible to and remarked 
upon by every other observer. 



INTRODUCTION. 31 

Thus we find him (p. 56) describing the 
Grenada Carenage as being surrounded by 
forest trees, causing its waters to present a 
violet tint ; whilst every one familiar with that 
locality knows that there are no forest trees 
within two miles of the object which they are 
so ingeniously made to colour. Again, and aptly 
illustrating the influence of his prejudices on 
his sense of hearing, we will notice somewhat 
more in detail the following assertion respecting 
the speech of the gentry of Barbados : — 

" The language of the Anglo-Barbadians was 
pure English, the voices without the smallest 
transatlantic intonation." 

Now it so happens that no Barbadian born 
and bred, be he gentle or simple, can, on 
opening his lips, avoid the fate of Peter of 
Galilee when skulking from the peril of a 
detected nationality: ''Thy speech bewray eth 
thee ! " It would, however, be prudent on 
this point to take the evidence of other Eng- 
lishmen, whose testimony is above suspicion, 
seeing that they were free from the moral dis- 
turbance that affected Mr. Froude's auditory 
powers. G. J. Chester, in his "Transatlantic 
Sketches" (page 95), deposes as follows: — 



32 FROUDACITY. 

" But worse, far worse than the colour, both 
of men and women, is their voice and accent. 
Well may Coleridge enumerate among the 
pains of the West Indies, * the yawny-drawny 
way in which men converse/ The soft, whining 
drawl is simply intolerable. Resemble the 
worst Northern States woman's accent it may 
in some degree, but it has not a grain of its 
vigour. A man tells you, ' if you can speer 
it, to send a beerer with a bottle of bare', and 
the clergyman excruciates you by praying in 
church, ' Speer us, good Lord.' The English 
pronunciation of A and E is in most words 
transposed. Barbados has a considerable 
number of provincialisms of dialect. Some of 
these, as the constant use of " Mistress " for 
* Mrs.,' are interesting as archaisms, or words 
in use in the early days of the Colony, and 
which have never died out of use. Others are 
Yankeeisms or vulgarisms ; others, again, such 
as the expression 'turning curiums,' i.e. sum- 
mersets, from cuffums, a species of fish, seem 
to be of local origin." 

In a note hereto appended, the author gives 
a list of English words of peculiar use and 
acceptation in Barbados. 



INTRODUCTION. 33 

To the same effect writes Anthony Trollope : 
" But if the black people differ from their 
brethren of the other islands, so certainly do 
the white people. One soon learns to know — 
a Bim. That is the name in which they them- 
selves delight, and therefore, though there is 
a sound of slang about it, I give it here. One 
certainly soon learns to know a Bim. The 
most peculiar distinction is in his voice. There 
is always a nasal twang about it, but quite 
distinct from the nasality of a Yankee. The 
Yankee's word rings sharp through his nose ; 
not so that of the first-class Bim. There is 
a soft drawl about it, and the sound is seldom 
completely formed. The effect on the ear is 
the same as that on the hand when a man gives 
you his to shake, and instead of shaking yours, 
holds his own still, &c, &c." ("The West 
Indies," p. 207). 

From the above and scores of other authori- 
tative testimonies which might have been cited 
to the direct contrary of our traveller's tale 
under this head, we can plainly perceive 
that Mr. Froude's love is not only blind, but 
adder-deaf as well. We shall now contemplate 
him under circumstances where his feelings are 
quite other than those of a partisan. 

3 



34 FROUDACITY. 

VOYAGE OUT. 

That Mr. Froude, despite his professions to 
the contrary, did not go out on his explorations 
unhampered by prejudices, seems clear enough 
from the following quotation : — 

" There was a small black boy among us, 
evidently of pure blood, for his hair was wool 
and his colour black as ink. His parents must 
have been well-to-do, for the boy had been to 
Europe to be educated. The officers on board 
and some of the ladies played with him as they 
would play with a monkey. He had little more 
sense than a monkey, perhaps less, and the 
gestures of him grinning behind gratings and 
perching out his long thin arms between the 
bars were curiously suggestive of the original 
from whom we are told now that all of us came. 
The worst of it was that, being lifted above his 
own people, he had been taught to despise them. 
He was spoilt as a black and could not be 
made into a white, and this I found afterwards 
was the invariable and dangerous consequence 
whenever a superior negro contrived to raise 
himself. He might do well enough himself, but 
his family feel their blood as degradation. His 



VOYAGE OUT. 35 

children will not marry among their own people, 
and not only will no white girl marry a negro, 
but hardly any dowry can be large enough to 
tempt a West Indian white to make a wife of 
a black lady. This is one of the most sinister 
features in the present state of social life there." 
We may safely assume that the playing of 
" the officers on board and some of the ladies " 
with the boy, "as they would play with a 
monkey," is evidently a suggestion of Mr. 
Froude's own soul, as well as the resemblance 
to the simian tribe which he makes out from 
the frolics of the lad. Verily, it requires an 
eye rendered more than microscopic by preju- 
dice to discern the difference between the gam- 
bols of juveniles of any colour under similar 
conditions. It is true that it might just be 
the difference between the friskings of white 
lambs and the friskings of lambs that are not 
white. That any black pupil should be taught 
to despise his own people through being lifted 
above them by education, seems a reckless 
statement, and far from patriotic withal ; inas- 
much as the education referred to here was 
European, and the place from which it was 
obtained presumably England. At all events, 



36 FROUDACITY. 

the difference among educated black men in 
deportment towards their unenlightened fel- 
low-blacks, can be proved to have nothing of 
that cynicism which often marks the bearing 
of Englishmen in an analogous case with re- 
gard to their less favoured countrymen. The 
statement that a black person can be " spoilt " 
for such by education, whilst he cannot be 
made white, is one of the silly conceits which 
the worship of the skin engenders in ill-con- 
ditioned minds. No sympathy should be 
wasted on the negro sufferer from mortification 
at not being able to " change his skin." The 
Ethiopian of whatever shade of colour who is 
not satisfied with being such was never in- 
tended to be more than a mere living figure. 
Mr. Froude further confidently states that whilst 
a superior Negro " might do well himself," yet 
" his family feel their blood as a degradation." 
If there be some who so feel, they are indeed 
very much to be pitied ; but their sentiments are 
not entitled to the serious importance with 
which our critic has invested them. But is it 
at all conceivable that a people whose sanity has 
never in any way been questioned would strain 
every nerve to secure for their offspring a 



VOYAGE OUT. 37 

distinction the consequence of which to them- 
selves would be a feeling of their own abase- 
ment ? The poor Irish peasant who toils and 
starves to secure for his eldest son admission 
into the Catholic priesthood, has a far other feel- 
ing than one of humiliation when contemplating 
that son eventually as the spiritual director of a 
congregation and parish. Similarly, the laud- 
able ambition which, in the case of a humble 
Scotch matron, is expressed in the wish and 
exertion to see her Jamie or Geordie " wag his 
pow in the pou'pit," produces, when realized, 
salutary effects in the whole family connection. 
These effects, which Mr. Froude would doubt- 
less allow and commend in their case, he finds 
it creditable to ignore the very possibility of 
in the experience of people whose cuticle 
is not white. It is, however, but bare justice 
to say that, as Negroes are by no means 
deficient in self-love and the tenderness of 
natural affection, such gratifying fulfilment of a 
family's hopes exerts an elevating and, in many 
cases, an ennobling influence on every one 
connected with the fortunate household. Nor, 
from the eminently sympathetic nature of the 
African race, are the near friends of a family 



38 FROUDACITY. 

unbenefited in a similar way. This is true, and 
distinctively human ; but, naturally, no apolo- 
gist of Negro depreciation would admit the 
reasonableness of applying to the affairs of 
Negroes the principles of common equity, or 
even of common sense. To sum up practically 
our argument on this head, we shall suppose 
West Indians to be called upon to imagine that 
the less distinguished relations respectively ofi 
say, the late Solicitor-General of Trinidad and 
the present Chief Justice of Barbados could 
be otherwise than legitimately elated at the 
conspicuous position won by a member of their 
own household. 

Mr. Froude further ventures to declare, in this 
connection, that the children of educated coloured 
folk " will not marry among their own people." 
Will he tell us, then, whom the daughters 
marry, or if they ever do marry at all, since he 
asserts, with regard to West Indian Whites, that 
" hardly any dowry can be large enough to 
tempt them to make a wife of a black lady" ? 
Our author evidently does not feel or care that 
the suggestion he here induces is a hideous 
slander against a large body of respectable people 
of whose affairs he is absolutely ignorant. Full 



VOYAGE OUT. 39 

of the "go" imparted to his talk by a conscious- 
ness of absolute license with regard to Negroes, 
our dignified narrator makes the parenthetical 
assertion that no white girl (in the West 
Indies) will " marry a Negro." But has he 
been informed that cases upon cases have 
occurred in those Colonies, and in very high 
"Anglo- West Indian" families too, where the 
social degradation of being married to Negroes 
has been avoided by the alternative of forming 
base private connections even with menials of 
that race ? 

The marrying of a black wife, on the other 
hand, by a West Indian White was an event of 
frequent occurrence at a period in regard to 
which our historian seems to be culpably un- 
informed. In slavery days, when all planters, 
black and white alike, were fused in a common 
solidarity of interests, the skin - distinction 
which Mr. Froude so strenuously advocates, 
and would fain risk so much to promote, did 
not, so far as matrimony was concerned, exist 
in the degree that it now does. Self-interest 
often dictated such unions, especially on the 
part of in-coming Whites desiring to strengthen 
their position and to increase their influence in 



4 o FRO UD A CITY. 

the land of their adoption by means of advan- 
tageous Creole marriages. Love, too, sheer 
uncalculating love, impelled not a few Whites to 
enter the hymeneal state with the dusky cap- 
tivators of their affections. When rich, the 
white planter not seldom paid for such gratifi- 
cation of his laudable impulse by accepting 
exclusion from " Society" — and when poor, he 
incurred almost invariably his dismissal from 
employment. Of course, in all cases of the 
sort the dispensers of such penalties were 
actuated by high motives which, nevertheless, 
did not stand in the way of their meeting, in 
the households of the persons thus obnoxious 
to punishment, the same or even a lower 
class of Ethiopic damsels, under the title of 
" housekeeper," on whom they lavished a 
very plethora of caresses. Perhaps it may be 
wrong so to hint it, but, judging from indica- 
tions in his own book, our author himself would 
have been liable in those days to enthralment 
by the piquant charms that proved irresistible 
to so many of his brother-Europeans. It is 
almost superfluous to repeat that the skin- 
discriminating policy induced as regards the 
coloured subjects of the Queen since the 



BARBADOS. 41 

abolition of slavery did not, and could not, 
operate when coloured and white stood on the 
same high level as slave-owners and ruling 
potentates in the Colonies. Of course, when 
the administrative power passed entirely into 
the hands of British officials, their colonial 
compatriots coalesced with them, and found 
no loss in being in the good books of the 
dominant personages. 

In conclusion of our remarks upon the above 
extracts, it may be stated that the blending of 
the races is not a burning question. "It can 
keep," as Mr. Bright wittily said with regard to 
a subject of similar urgency. Time and Nature 
might safely be left uninterfered with to work 
out whatever social development of this kind 
is in store for the world and its inhabitants. 

BARBADOS. 

Our distinguished voyager visited many of 
the British West Indies, landing first at 
Barbados, his social experience whereof is set 
forth in a very agreeable account. Our im- 
mediate business, however, is not with what 
West Indian hospitality, especially among the 
well-to-do classes, can and does accomplish for 



42 FROUDACITY. 

the entertainment of visitors, and particularly 
visitors so eminent as Mr. Froude. We are 
concerned with what Mr. Froude has to say 
concerning our dusky brethren and sisters in 
those Colonies. We have, thus, much pleasure 
in being able at the outset to extract the 
following favourable verdict of his respecting 
them — premising, at the same time, that the 
balcony from which Mr. Froude surveyed the 
teeming multitude in Bridgetown was that of 
a grand hotel at which he had, on invitation, 
partaken of the refreshing beverage mentioned 
in the citation : — 

tl Cocktail over, and walking in the heat of the 
sun being a thing not to be thought of, I sat for 
two hours in the balcony, watching the people, 
who were as thick as bees in swarming time. 
Nine-tenths of them were pure black. You 
rarely saw a white face, but still less would you 
see a discontented one, imperturbable good 
humour and self-satisfaction being written on 
the features of every one. The women struck 
me especially. They were smartly dressed in 
white calico, scrupulously clean, and tricked out 
with ribands and feathers ; but their figures 
were so good, and they carried themselves so 



BARBADOS. 43 

well and gracefully, that although they might 
make themselves absurd, they could not look 
vulgar. Like the Greek and Etruscan women, 
they are trained from childhood to carry 
weights on their heads. They are thus per- 
fectly upright, and plant their feet firmly and 
naturally on the ground. They might serve 
for sculptors' models, and are well aware of it." 
Regarding the other sex, Mr. Froudesays: — 
"The men were active enough, driving carts, 
wheeling barrows, and selling flying-fish," &c. 

He also speaks with candour of the entire 
absence of drunkenness and quarrelling, and 
the agreeable prevalence of good humour and 
light-heartedness among them. Some critic 
might, on reading the above extract from our 
author's account of the men, be tempted to 
ask — " But what is the meaning of that little 
word ' enough ' occurring therein ? " We 
should be disposed to hazard a suggestion that 
Mr. Froude, being fair-minded and loyal to 
truth, as far as is compatible with his sympathy 
for his hapless " Anglo- West Indians," could 
not give an entirely ungrudging testimony in 
favour of the possible, nay probable, voters by 
whose suffrages the supremacy of the Dark 



44 FROUDACITY. 

Parliament will be ensured, and the relapse 
into obeahism, devil-worship, and children- 
eating be inaugurated. Nevertheless, Si sic 
omnia dixisset — if he had said all things thus ! 
Yes, if Mr. Froude had, throughout his 
volume, spoken in this strain, his occasional 
want of patience and fairness with regard to 
our male kindred might have found condona- 
tion in his even more than chivalrous appre- 
ciation of our womankind. But it has been 
otherwise. So we are forced to try conclusions 
with him in the arena of his own selection — 
unreflecting spokesman that he is of British 
colonialism, which, we grieve to learn through 
Mr. Froude's pages, has, like the Bourbon 
family, not only forgotten nothing, but, un- 
fortunately for its own peace, learnt nothing 
also. 

ST. VINCENT. 

The following are the words in which our 
traveller embodies the main motive and pur- 
pose of his voyage : — 

" My own chief desire was to see the human 
inhabitants, to learn what they were doing, how 
they were living, and what they were thinking 
about. . . ." 



ST. VINCENT. 45 

But, alas, with the mercurialism of tempera- 
ment in which he has thought proper to 
indulge when only Negroes and Europeans 
not of " Anglo- West Indian" tendencies were 
concerned, he jauntily threw to the winds all 
the scruples and cautious minuteness which were 
essential to the proper execution of his project. 
At Barbados, as we have seen, he satisfies 
himself with sitting aloft, at a balcony- window, 
to contemplate the movements of the sable 
throng below, of whose character, moral and 
political, he nevertheless professes to have 
become a trustworthy delineator. From the 
above-quoted account of his impressions of the 
external traits and deportment of the Ethiopic 
folk thus superficially gazed at, our author 
passes on to an analysis of their mental 
and moral idiosyncrasies, and other intimate 
matters, which the very silence of the book 
as to his method of ascertaining them is a 
sufficent proof that his knowledge in their 
regard has not been acquired directly and at 
first hand. Nor need we say that the gene- 
rally adverse cast of his verdicts on what he had 
been at no pains to study for himself points 
to the " hostileness " of the witnesses whose 



46 FROUDACITY. 

testimony alone has formed the basis of his 
conclusions. Throughout Mr. Froude's tour 
in the British Colonies his intercourse was 
exclusively with " Anglo- West Indians," whose 
aversion to the Blacks he has himself, perhaps 
they would think indiscreetly, placed on record. 
In no instance do we find that he condescended 
to visit the abode of any Negro, whether it was 
the mansion of a gentleman or the hut of a 
peasant of that race. The whole tenor of the 
book indicates his rigid adherence to this 
onesided course, and suggests also that, as a 
traveller, Mr. Froude considers maligning on 
hearsay to be just as convenient as reporting 
facts elicited by personal investigation. Pro- 
ceed we, however, to strengthen our statement 
regarding his definitive abandonment, and that 
without any apparent reason, of the plan he 
had professedly laid down for himself at 
starting, and failing which no trustworthy 
data could have been obtained concerning the 
character and disposition of the people about 
whom he undertakes to thoroughly enlighten his 
readers. Speaking of St. Vincent, where he 
arrived immediately after leaving Barbados, our 
author says : — 



ST VINCENT. 47 

" I did not land,. for the time was short, and 
as a beautiful picture the island was best seen 
from the deck. The characteristics of the 
people are the same in all the Antilles, and 
could be studied elsewhere." 

Now, it is a fact, patent and notorious, that 
"the characteristics of the people are" not 
"the same in all the Antilles." A man of Mr. 
Froude's attainments, whose studies have made 
him familiar with ethnological facts, must be 
aware that difference of local surroundings and 
influences does, in the course of time, inevitably 
create difference of characteristic and deport- 
ment. Hence there is in nearly every Colony 
a marked dissimilarity of native qualities 
amongst the Negro inhabitants, arising not only 
from the causes above indicated, but largely 
also from the great diversity of their African an- 
cestry. We might as well be told that because 
the nations of Europe are generally white and 
descended from Japhet, they could be studied 
one by the light derived from acquaintance 
with another. We venture to declare that, 
unless a common education from youth has 
been shared by them, the Hamitic inhabitants 
of one island have very little in common with 



48 FROUDACIT\. 

those of another, beyond the dusky skin and 
woolly hair. In speech, character, and deport- 
ment, a coloured native of Trinidad differs as 
much from one of Barbados as a North 
American black does from either, in all the 
above respects. 

GRENADA. 

In Grenada, the next island he arrived at, 
our traveller's procedure with regard to the 
inhabitants was very similar. There he landed 
in the afternoon, drove three or four miles 
inland to dine at the house of a "gentleman 
who was a passing resident," returned in the 
dark to his ship, and started for Trinidad. 
In the course of this journey back, however, 
as he sped along in the carriage, Mr. Froude 
found opportunity to look into the people's 
houses along the way, where, he tells us, he 
" could see and was astonished to observe signs 
of comfort, and even signs of taste — armchairs, 
sofas, side-boards with cut-glass upon them, 
engravings and coloured prints upon the 
walls." As a result of this nocturnal exami- 
nation, d vol d'oiseau, he has written paragraph 
upon paragraph about the people's character 



GRENADA. 49 

and prospects in the island of Grenada. To 
read the patronizing terms in which our 
historian-traveller has seen fit to comment on 
Grenada and its people, one would believe 
that his account is of some half-civilized, out- 
of-the-way region under British sway, and 
inhabited chiefly by a horde of semi-barbarian 
ignoramuses of African descent. If the world 
had not by this time thoroughly assessed the 
intrinsic value of Mr. Froude's utterances, one 
who knows Grenada might have felt inclined 
to resent his causeless depreciation of the 
intellectual capacity of its inhabitants ; but con- 
sidering the estimate which has been pretty 
generally formed of his historical judgment, 
Mr. Froude may be dismissed, as regards 
Grenada and its people, with a certain degree 
of scepticism. Such scepticism, though lost 
upon himself, is unquestionably needful to pro- 
tect his readers from the hallucination which 
the author's singular contempt for accuracy is 
but too liable to induce. 

Those who know Grenada and its affairs 
are perfectly familiar with the fact that all of 
its chief intellectual business, whether official 
(even in the highest degree, such as temporary 

4 



5 o FROUDACITY. 

administration of the government), legal, com- 
mercial, municipal, educational, or journalistic, 
has been for years upon years carried on by 
men of colour. And what, as a consequence 
of this fact, has the world ever heard in dis- 
paragement of Grenada throughout this long 
series of years ? Assuredly not a syllable. On 
the contrary, she has been the theme of praise, 
not only for the admirable foresight with which 
she avoided the sugar crisis, so disastrous to 
her sister islands, but also for the pluck and 
persistence shown in sustaining herself through 
an agricultural emergency brought about by 
commercial reverses, whereby the steady march 
of her sons in self-advancement was only 
checked for a time, but never definitively 
arrested. In fine, as regards every branch of 
civilized employment pursued there, the good 
people of Grenada hold their own so well and 
worthily that any show of patronage, even from 
a source more entitled to confidence, would 
simply be a piece of obtrusive kindness, not 
acceptable to any, seeing that it is required by 
none. 



BOOK II. 



Tfjinid^d. 



Mr. Froude, crossing the ninety miles of the 
Caribbean Sea lying between Grenada and 
Trinidad, lands next morning in Port of Spain, 
the chief city of that " splendid colony," as 
Governor Irving, its worst ruler, truly calls 
it in his farewell message to the Legislature. 
Regarding Port of Spain in particular, Mr. 
Froude is positively exuberant in the display 
of the peculiar qualities that distinguish him, 
and which we have already admitted. Ecstatic 
praise and groundless detraction go hand in 
hand, bewildering to any one not possessed 
of the key to the mystery of the art of blow- 
ing hot and cold, which Mr. Froude so start- 
lingly exemplifies. As it is our purpose to 
make what he says concerning this Colony the 
crucial test of his veracity as a writer of travels, 



54 FR0UDAC1TY. 

and also of the value of his judgments respect- 
ing men and things, we shall first invite the 
reader's attention to the following extracts, with 
our discussion thereof : — 

" On landing we found ourselves in a large 
foreign -looking town, Port of Spain having 
been built by French and Spaniards according 
to their national tendencies, and especially with 
a view to the temperature, which is that of a 
forcing house, and rarely falls below 8o°. The 
streets are broad, and are planted with trees 
for shade, each house where room permits 
having a garden of its own, with palms and 
mangoes and coffee-plants and creepers. Of 
sanitary arrangements there seemed to be none. 
There is abundance of rain, and the gutters 
which run down by the footway are flushed 
almost every day. But they are all open. 
Dirt of every kind lies about freely, to be 
washed into them or left to putrify as fate shall 
direct " (p. 64). 

Lower down, on the same page, our author, 
luxuriating in his contempt for exactitude when 
the character of other folk only is at stake, 
continues : — " The town has between thirty 
and forty thousand people living in it, and the 



REFORM IN TRINIDAD. 55 

rain and Johnny crows between them keep off 
pestilence!' On page 65 we have the following 
astounding statement with respect to one of the 
trees in the garden in front of the house in 
which Mr. Froude was sojourning : — " At the 
gate stood as sentinel a cabbage palm a 
hundred feet high!' 

The above quotations, in which we have 
elected to be content with indicating by typo- 
graphical differences the points on which atten- 
tion should be mostly directed, will suffice, with 
any one knowing Trinidad, as examples of Mr. 
Froude's trustworthiness. But as these are 
only on matters of mere detail, involving no 
question of principle, they are dismissed with- 
out any further comment. It must not be so, 
however, with the following remarkable de- 
liverances which occur on page 67 of his too 
picturesque work : — " The commonplace in- 
trudes upon the imaginative. At moments one 
can fancy that the world is an enchanted place 
after all, but then comes generally an absurd 
awakening. On the first night of my arrival, 
before we went to bed, there came an invitation 
to me to attend a political meeting which was 
to be held in a few days on the Savannah. 



56 FROUDACITY. 

Trinidad is a purely Crown colony, and has 
escaped hitherto the introduction of the election 
virus. The newspapers and certain busy 
gentlemen in Port of Spain had discovered 
that they were living under a ' degrading 
tyranny,' and they demanded a constitution. 
They did not complain that their affairs had 
been ill-managed. On the contrary, they in- 
sisted that they were the most prosperous of 
the West Indian colonies, and alone had a 
surplus in their treasury. If this was so, it 
seemed to me that they had better let well 
alone. The population, all told, zvas but 
170,000, less by thirty thousand than that of 
Barbados. They were a mixed and motley 
assemblage of all races and colours, busy each 
with their own affairs, and never hitherto 
troubling themselves about politics. But it 
had pleased the Home Government to set 
up the beginning of a constitution again in 
Jamaica ; no one knew why, but so it was ; and 
Trinidad did not choose to be behindhand. 
The official appointments were valuable, and 
had been hitherto given away by the Crown. 
The local popularities very naturally wished 
to have them for themselves. This was the 



REFORM IN TRINIDAD. 57 

reality in the thing, so far as there was a 
reality. It was dressed up in the phrases 
borrowed from the great English masters of 
the art, about privileges of manhood, moral 
dignity, the elevating influence of the suffrage, 
&c, intended for home consumption among the 
believers in the orthodox radical faith." 

The passages which we have signalized in 
the above quotation, and which occur with more 
elaboration and heedless assurance on a later 
page, will produce a feeling of wonder at the 
hardihood of him who not only conceived, but 
penned and dared, to publish them as well, 
against the gentlemen whom we all know to be 
be foremost in the political agitation at which 
Mr. Froude so flippantly sneers. An emphatic 
denial may be opposed to his pretence that 
"they did not complain that their affairs had 
been ill-managed." Why, the very gist and 
kernel of the whole agitation, set forth in print 
through long years of iteration, has been the 
scandalous mismanagement of the affairs of the 
Colony — especially under the baleful adminis- 
tration of Governor Irving. The Augean 
Stable, miscalled by him " The Public Works 
Department," and whose officials he coolly 



5 8 FROUDACITY. 

fastened upon the financial vitals of that long- 
suffering Colony, baffled even the resolute 
will of a Des Vceux to cleanse it. Poor Sir 
Sanford Freeling attempted the cleansing, but 
foundered ignominiously almost as soon as he 
embarked on that Herculean enterprise. Sir 
A. E. Havelock, who came after, must be 
mentioned by the historian of Trinidad merely 
as an incarnate accident in the succession of 
Governors to whom the destinies of that 
maltreated Colony have been successively 
intrusted since the departure of Sir Arthur 
Hamilton Gordon. The present Governor of 
Trinidad, Sir William Robinson, is a man of 
spirit and intelligence, keenly alive to the grave 
responsibilities resting on him as a ruler of men 
and moulder of men's destinies. Has he, with 
all his energy, his public spirit and indisputable 
devotion to the furtherance of the Colony's 
interests, been able to grapple successfully with 
the giant evil ? Has he effectually gained the 
ear of our masters in Downing Street regarding 
the inefficiency and wastefulness of Governor 
Irving's pet department ? We presume that 
his success has been but very partial, for other- 
wise it is difficult to conceive the motive for 



REFORM IN TRINIDAD. 59 

retaining the army of officials radiating from 
that office, with the chief under whose super- 
vision so many architectural and other scandals 
have for so long been the order of the day. 
The Public Works Department is costly enough 
to have been a warning to the whole of the 
West Indies. It is true that the lavish squan- 
dering of the people's money by that depart- 
ment has been appreciably checked since the 
advent of the present head of the Government. 
The papers no longer team with accounts, nor is 
even the humblest aesthetic sense offended now, 
as formerly, with views of unsightly, useless and 
flimsy erections, the cost of which, on an aver- 
age, was five times more than that of good 
and reputable structures. 

This, however, has been entirely due to 
the personal influence of the Governor. Sir 
William Robinson, not being the tool, as Sir 
Henry Irving owned that he was, of the 
Director of Public Works, could not be ex- 
pected to be his accomplice or screener in the 
cynical waste of the public funds. Here, then, 
is the personal rectitude of a ruler operating 
as a safeguard to the people's interests ; and 
we gladly confess our entire agreement with 



6o FROUDACITY. 

Mr. Froude on the subject of the essential quali- 
fications of a Crown Governor. Mr. Froude 
contends, and we heartily coincide with him, 
that a ruler of high training and noble purposes 
would, as the embodiment of the administrative 
authority, be the very best provision for the 
government of Colonies constituted as ours are. 
But he has also pointed out, and that in no 
equivocal terms, that the above are far from 
having been indispensable qualifications for the 
patronage of Downing Street. He has shown 
that the Colonial Office is, more often than 
otherwise, swayed in the appointment of 
Colonial Governors by considerations among 
which the special fitness of the man appointed 
holds but a secondary place. On this point we 
have much gratification in giving Mr. Froude's 
own words (p. 91) : — " Among the public ser- 
vants of Great Britain there are persons always 
to be found fit and willing for posts of honour 
and difficulty if a sincere effort be made to find 
them. Alas ! in times past we have sent 
persons to rule our Baratarias to whom 
Sancho Panza was a sage — troublesome 
members of Parliament, younger brothers of 
powerful families, impecunious peers ; favour- 



REFORM IN TRINIDAD. 61 

ites, with backstairs influence, for whom a 
provision was to be found ; colonial clerks 
bred in the office who had been obsequious 
and useful ! " Now then, applying these facts 
to the political history of Trinidad, with which 
we are more particularly concerned at present, 
what do we find ? We find that in the person 
of Sir A. H. Gordon (1867-1870) that Colony at 
length chanced upon a ruler both competent 
and eager to advance her interests, not only 
materially, but in the nobler respects that give 
dignity to the existence of a community. Of 
course, he was opposed — ably, strenuously, vio- 
lently, virulently — but the metal of which the 
man was composed was only fused into greater 
firmness by being subjected to such fiery 
tests. On leaving Trinidad, this eminent ruler 
left as legacies to the Colony he had loved 
and worked for so heartily, laws that placed 
the persons and belongings of the inhabitants 
beyond the reach of wanton aggression ; the 
means by which honest and laborious industry 
could, through agriculture, benefit both itself 
and the general revenue. He also left an 
educational system that opened (to even the 
humblest) a free pathway to knowledge, to 



62 FROUDACITY. 

distinction, and, if the objects of its beneficence 
were worthy of the boon, to serviceableness to 
their native country. Above all, he left peace 
among the jarring interests which, under the 
badge of Englishman and of Creole, under 
the badge of Catholic and under the badge 
of Protestant, and so many other forms of 
sectional divergence, had too long distracted 
Trinidad. This he had effected, not by consti- 
tuting himself a partisan of either section, but 
by inquiring with statesmanlike appreciation, 
and allowing the legitimate claims of each to 
a certain scope of influence in the furtherance 
of the Colony's welfare. Hence the bitter 
rivalry of jarring interests was transformed into 
harmonious co-operation on all sides, in advanc- 
ing the common good of the common country. 

The Colonial Office, knowing little and caring 
less about that noble jewel in the British Crown, 
sent out as successor to so brilliant and success- 
ful an administrator — whom ? One Sir James 
Robert Longden, a gentleman without initiative, 
without courage, and, above all, with a slavish 
adherence to red-tape and a clerk-like dread of 
compromising his berth. Having served for 
a long series of years in subordinate posts in 



REFORM IN TRINIDAD. 63 

minor dependencies, the habit of being im- 
pressed and influenced by colonial magnates 
grew and gathered strength within him. Such 
a ruler, of course, the serpents that had only 
been " scotched, but not killed," by the stern pro- 
cedures of Governor Gordon, could wind round, 
beguile, and finally cause to fall. Measure 
after measure of his predecessor which he could 
in any way neutralize in the interests of the 
colonial clique, was rendered of none effect. In 
fact, he was subservient to the wishes of those 
who had all long objected to those measures, 
but had not dared even to hint their objections 
to the beneficent autocrat who had willed and 
given them effect for the general welfare. 
After Governor Longden came Sir Henry 
Turner Irving, a personage who brought to 
Trinidad a reputation for all the vulgar colonial 
prejudices which, discreditable enough in ordi- 
nary folk, are, in the Governor of a mixed 
community, nothing less than calamitous. 
More than amply did he justify the evil reports 
with which rumour had heralded his coming. 
Abler, more astute, more daring than Sir James 
Longden, who was, on the whole, only a con- 
stitutionally timid man, Governor Irving threw 



64 FROUDACITY. 

himself heart and soul into the arms of the 
Sugar Interest, by whom he had been helped 
into his high office, and whose belief he evi- 
dently shared, that sugar-growers alone should 
be possessors of the lands of the West Indies. 
It would be wearisome to detail the methods 
by which every act of Sir Arthur Gordon's to 
benefit the whole population was cynically and 
systematically undone by this his native-hating 
successor. In short, the policy of reaction which 
Sir James Longden began, found in Governor 
Irving not only a consistent promoter, but, as it 
were, a sinister incarnation. It is true that he 
could not, at the bidding and on the advice of 
his planter-friends, shut up the Crown Lands 
of the Colony against purchasers of limited 
means, because they happened to be mostly 
natives of colour, but he could annul the pro- 
vision by which every Warden in the rural 
districts, on the receipt of the statutory fees, 
had to supply a Government title on the spot to 
every one who purchased any acreage of Crown 
Lands. Every intending purchaser, therefore, 
whether living at Toco, Guayaguayare, Monos, 
or Icacos, the four extreme points of the Island 
of Trinidad, was compelled to go to Port of 



REFORM IN TRINIDAD. 65 

Spain, forty or fifty miles distant, through an 
almost roadless country, to compete at the Sub- 
Intendant's auction sales, with every probability 
of being outbid in the end, and having his long- 
deposited money returned to him after all his 
pains. Lieutenant-Governor Des Voeux told 
the Legislature of Trinidad that the monstrous 
Excise imposts of the Colony were an incentive 
to smuggling, and he thought that the duties, 
licenses, &c, should be lowered in the interest 
of good and equitable government. Sir Henry 
Turner Irving, however, besides raising the 
duties on spirituous liquors, also enacted that 
every distillery, however small, must pay a 
salary to a Government official stationed within 
it to supervise the manufacture of the spirits. 
This, of course, was the death-blow to all the 
minor competition which had so long been dis- 
turbing the peace of mind of the mighty pos- 
sessors of the great distilleries. Ahabwas thus 
made glad with the vineyard of Naboth. 

In the matter of official appointments, 
too, Governor Irving was consistent in his 
ostentatious hostility to Creoles in general, 
and to coloured Creoles in particular. Of the 
fifty-six appointments which that model Go- 

5 



66 FROUDACITY. 

vernor made in 1876, only seven happened to 
be natives and coloured, out of a population in 
which the latter element is so preponderant as 
to excite the fears of Mr. Froude. In educational 
matters, though he could not with any show of 
sense or decency re-enact the rule which ex- 
cluded students of illegitimate birth from the 
advantages of the Royal College, he could, 
nevertheless, pander to the prejudices of him- 
self and his friends by raising the standard of 
proficiency while reducing the limit of the age 
for free admission to that institution — boys of 
African descent having shown an irrepressible 
persistency in carrying off prizes. 

Every one acquainted with Trinidad politics 
knows very well the ineffably low dodges 
and subterfuges under which the Arima 
Railway was prevented from having its ter- 
minus in the centre of that town. The public 
was promised a saving of Eight Thousand 
Pounds by their high-minded Governor for a 
diversion of the line " by only a few yards" from 
the originally projected terminus. In the end 
it was found out not only that the terminus of 
the railway was nearly a whole mile outside 
of the town of Arima, but also that Twenty 



REFORM IN TRINIDAD. 67 

Thousand Pounds " Miscellaneous " had to be 
paid up by the good folk of Trinidad, in addi- 
tion to gulping down their disappointment at 
saving no Eight Thousand Pounds, and having 
to find by bitter experience, especially in rainy 
weather, that their Governor's few yards were 
just his characteristic way of putting down 
yards which he well knew were to be counted 
by hundreds. Then, again, we have the so- 
called San Fernando Waterworks, an abortion, 
a scandal for which there is no excuse, as the 
head of the Public Works Department went 
his own way despite the experience of those 
who knew better than he, and the protests of 
those who would have had to pay. Seventeen 
Thousand Pounds represent the amount of debt 
with which Governor Irving's pet department 
has saddled the town of San Fernando for 
water, which half the inhabitants cannot get, 
and which few of the half who do get it dare 
venture to drink. Summa fastigia rerum sectdi 
stimus. If in the works that were so prominent 
before the public gaze these enormous abuses 
could flourish, defiant of protest and opposition, 
what shall we think of the nooks and corners 
of that same squandering department, which of 



68 FROUDACITY. 

course must have been mere gnats in the eyes 
of a Governor who had swallowed so many- 
monstrous camels ! The Governor was callous. 
Trinidad was a battening ground for his friends ; 
but she had in her bosom men who were her 
friends, and the struggle began, constitutionally 
of course, which, under the leadership of the 
Mayor of San Fernando, has continued up to 
now, culminating at last in the Reform move- 
ment which Mr. Froude decries, and which his 
pupil, Mr. S. H. Gatty, is, from what has 
appeared in the Trinidad papers, doing his 
" level best " to render abortive. 

Sir Sanford Freeling, by the will and pleasure 
of Downing Street, was the next successor, 
after Governor Irving, to the chief ruler-ship 
of Trinidad. Incredible as it may sound, he 
was a yet more disadvantageous bargain for 
the Colony's ^4000 a year. A better man in 
many respects than his predecessor, he was in 
many more a much worse Governor. The 
personal affability of a man can be known only 
to those who come into actual contact with him 
—the public measures of a ruler over a com- 
munity touches it, mediately or immediately, 
throughout all its sections. The bad boldness of 



REFORM IN TRINIDAD. 69 

Governor Irving achieved much that the people, 
especially in the outlying districts, could see and 
appreciate. For example, he erected Rest-houses 
all over the remoter and more sparsely peopled 
quarters of the Colony, after the manner of such 
provisions in Oriental lands. The population 
who came in contact with these conveniences, 
and to whom access to them — for a considera- 
tion — had never been denied, saw with their 
own eyes tangible evidence of the Governor's 
activity, and inferred therefrom a solicitude on 
his part for the public welfare. Had they, how- 
ever, been given a notion of the bill which had 
had to be paid for those frail, though welcome 
hostelries, they would have stood aghast at the 
imbecility, or, if not logically that, the some- 
thing very much worse, through which five 
times the actual worth of these buildings had 
been extracted from the Treasury. Sir Sanford 
Freeling, on the other hand, while being no 
screener of jobbery and peculation, had not the 
strength of mind whereof jobbers and peculators 
do stand in dread. In evidence of that poor 
ruler's infirmity of purpose, we would only cite 
the double fact that, whereas in 1883 he was the 
first to enter a practical protest against the hous- 



7 o FROUDACITY. 

ing of the diseased and destitute in the then 
newly finished, but most leaky, House of Refuge 
on the St. Clair Lands, by having the poor 
saturated inmates carried off in his presence 
to the Colonial Hospital, yet His Excellency 
was the very man who, in the very next year, 
1884, not only sanctioned the shooting down 
of Indian immigrants at their festival, but 
actually directed the use of buck-shot for that 
purpose ! Evidently, if these two foregoing 
statements are true, Mr. Froude must join us 
in thinking that a man whose mind could be 
warped by external influences from the softest 
commiseration for the sufferings of his kind, 
one year, into being the cold-blooded deviser 
of the readiest method for slaughtering unarmed 
holiday-makers, the very next year, is not the 
kind of ruler whom he and we so cordially de- 
siderate. We have already mentioned above 
how ignominious Governor Freeling's failure 
was in attempting to meddle with the colossal 
abuses of the Public Works Department. 

Sir Arthur Elibank Havelock next had the 
privilege of enjoying the paradisaic sojourn at 
Queen's House, St. Ann's, as well as the 
four thousand pounds a year attached to the 



REFORM IN TRINIDAD, 71 

right of occupying that princely residence. Save 
as a dandy, however, and the harrier of sub- 
ordinate officials, the writer of the annals of 
Trinidad may well pass him by. So then it may 
be seen what, by mere freaks of Chance — the 
ruling deity at Downing Street — the adminis- 
trative experience of Trinidad had been from 
the departure of that true king in Israel, Sir 
Arthur Gordon, up to the visit of Mr. Froude. 
First, a slave to red-tape, procrastination, and 
the caprices of pretentious colonialists ; next, a 
daring schemer, confident of the support of the 
then dominant Sugar Interest, and regarding 
and treating the resources of the Island as 
free booty for his friends, sycophants, and 
favourites ; then, an old woman, garbed in 
male attire, having an infirmity of purpose 
only too prone to be blown about by every wind 
of doctrine, alternating helplessly between ten- 
derness and truculence, the charity of a Fry 
and the tragic atrocity of Medea. After this 
dismal ruler, Trinidad, by the grace of the 
Colonial Office, was subjected to the manipula- 
tion of an unctuous dandy. This successor of 
Gordon, of Elliot, and of Cairns, durst not 
oppose high-placed official malfeasants, but 



72 FROUDACITY. 

was inexorable with regard to minor delin- 
quents. In the above retrospect we have 
purposely omitted mentioning such transient 
rulers as Mr. Rennie, Sir G. W. Des Vceux, 
and last, but by no means least, Sir F. Barlee, 
a high-minded Governor, whom death so sud- 
denly and inscrutably snatched away from the 
good work he had loyally begun. Every one 
of the above temporary administrators was 
a right good man for a post in which brain- 
power and moral back-bone are essential quali- 
fications. But the Fates so willed it that 
Trinidad should never enjoy the permanent 
governance of either. In view of the above 
facts; in view also of the lessons taught the 
inhabitants of Trinadad so frequently, so 
cruelly, what wonder is there that, failing of 
faith in a probability, which stands one against 
four, of their getting another worthy ruler 
when Governor Robinson shall have left them, 
they should seek to make hay while the sun 
shines, by providing against the contingency of 
such Governors as they know from bitter ex- 
perience that Downing Street would place over 
their destinies, should the considerations de- 
tailed by Mr. Froude or any other equally 



REFORM IN TRINIDAD. 73 

unworthy counsellor supervene ? That the 
leading minds of Trinidad should believe in 
an elective legislature is a logical consequence 
of the teachings of the past, when the Colony 
was under the manipulation of the sort of 
Governors above mentioned as immediately 
succeeding Sir Arthur Gordon. 

This brings us to the motives, the sordid 
motives, which Mr. Froude, oblivious of the 
responsibility of his high literary status, has 
permitted himself gratuitously, and we may 
add scandalously, to impute to the heads of the 
Reform movement in Trinidad. It was per- 
fectly competent that our author should decline, 
as he did decline, to have anything to do, even 
as a spectator, at a meeting with the object of 
which he had no sympathy. But our opinion 
is equally decided that Mr. Froude has trans- 
gressed the bounds of decent political an- 
tagonism, nay, even of common sense, when 
he presumes to state that it was not for any 
other object than the large salaries of the 
Crown appointments, which they covet for 
themselves, that the Reform leaders are con- 
tending. This is not criticism : it is slander. 
To make culpatory statements against others, 



74 FROUDACITY. 

without ability to prove them, is, to say the 
least, hazardous ; but to make accusations to 
formulate which the accuser is forced, not only 
to ignore facts, but actually to deny them, is, to 
our mind, nothing short of rank defamation. 

Mr. Froude is not likely to impress the world 
(of the West Indies, at any rate) with the trans- 
parently silly, if not intentionally malicious, 
ravings which he has indulged in on the subject 
of Trinidad and its politics. Here are some 
of the things which this "champion of Anglo- 
West Indians " attempts to force down the 
throats of his readers. He would have us 
believe that Mr. Francis Damian, the Mayor 
of Port of Spain, and one of the wealthiest 
of the native inhabitants of Trinidad, a man 
who has retired from an honourable and 
lucrative legal practice, and devotes his time, 
his talents, and his money to the service of 
his native country ; that Mr. Robert Guppy, 
the venerable and venerated Mayor of San 
Fernando, with his weight of years and his 
sufficing competence, and with his long record 
of self-denying services to the public ; that Mr. 
George Goodwille, one of the most successful 
merchants in the Colonies ; that Mr. Conrad 



REFORM IN TRINIDAD. 75 

F. Stollmeyer, a gentleman retired, in the 
evening of his days, on his well-earned ample 
means, are open to the above sordid accusation. 
In short, that those and such-like individuals 
who, on account of their private resources 
and mental capabilities, as well as the public 
influence resulting therefrom, are, by the sheer 
logic of circumstances, forced to be at the head 
of public movements, are actuated by a craving 
for the few hundred pounds a year for which 
there is such a scramble at Downing Street 
among the future official grandees of the West 
Indies ! But granting that this allegation of 
Mr. Froude's was not as baseless as we have 
shown it to be, and that the leaders of the 
Reform agitation were impelled by the desire 
which our author seeks to discredit them with, 
what then ? Have they who have borne the 
heat and the burden of the day in making the 
Colonies what they are no right to the enjoy- 
ment of the fruits of their labours ? The local 
knowledge, the confidence and respect of the 
population, which such men enjoy, and can 
wield for good or evil in the community, are 
these matters of small account in the efficient 
government of the Colony ? Our author, in 



76 FROUDACITY. 

specifying the immunities of his ideal Governor, 
who is also ours, recommends, amongst other 
things, that His Excellency should be allowed 
to choose his own advisers. By this Mr. 
Froude certainly does not mean that the 
advisers so chosen must be all pure-blooded 
Englishmen who have rushed from the destitu- 
tion of home to batten on the cheaply obtained 
flesh-pots of the Colonies. 

At any rate, whatever political fate Mr. 
Froude may desire for the Colonies in general, 
and for Trinidad in particular, it is nevertheless 
unquestionable that he and the scheme that he 
may have for our future governance, in this 
year of grace 1888, have both come into view 
entirely out of season. The spirit of the times 
has rendered impossible any further toleration 
of the arrogance which is based on historical 
self-glorification. The gentlemen of Trinidad, 
who are struggling for political enfranchisement, 
are not likely to heed, except as a matter for 
indignant contempt, the obtrusion by our author 
of his opinion that " they had best let well 
alone." On his own showing, the persons 
appointed to supreme authority in the Colonies 
are, more usually than not, entirely unfit for 



REFORM IN TRINIDAD. 77 

holding any responsible position whatever over 
their fellows. Now, can it be doubted that less 
care, less scruple, less consideration, would be 
exercised in the choice of the satellites appointed 
to revolve, in these far-off latitudes, around the 
central luminaries ? Have we not found, are 
we not still finding every day, that the brain- 
dizzinesss — Xenophon calls it tcefyaXaXyeia — 
induced by sudden promotion has transformed 
the abject suppliants at the Downing Street 
backstairs into the arrogant defiers of the 
opinions, and violators of the rights, of the 
populations whose subjection to the British 
Crown alone could have rendered possible the 
elevation of such folk and their impunity in 
malfeasance ? The cup of loyal forbearance 
reached the overflowing point since the trick- 
stering days of Governor Irving, and it is 
useless now to believe in the possibility of a 
return of the leading minds of Trinidad to 
a tame acquiescence as regards the probabilities 
of their government according to the Crown 
system. Mr. Froude's own remarks point out 
definitely enough that a community so governed 
is absolutely at the mercy, for good or for evil, 
of the man who happens to be invested with 



78 FR0UDAC1TY. 

the supreme authority. He has also shown 
that in our case that supreme authority is 
very often disastrously entrusted. Yet has he 
nothing but sneers for the efforts of those who 
strive to be emancipated from liability to such 
subjection. Mr. Froude's deftly-worded sar- 
casms about " degrading tyranny," " the dignity 
of manhood," &c, are powerless to alter the 
facts. Crown Colony Government — denying, as 
it does, to even the wisest and most interested 
in a community cursed with it all participation 
in the conduct of their own affairs, while in- 
vesting irresponsible and uninterested " birds of 
passage " (as our author aptly describes them) 
with the right of making ducks and drakes of 
the resources wrung from the inhabitants — is 
a degrading tyranny, which the sneers of Mr. 
Froude cannot make otherwise. The dignity 
of manhood, on the other hand, we are forced 
to admit, runs scanty chance of recognition by 
any being, however masculine his name, who 
could perpetrate such a literary and moral 
scandal as "The Bow of Ulysses." Yet the 
dignity of manhood stands venerable there, 
and whilst the world lasts shall gain for its 
possessors the right of record on the roll of 



REFORM IN TRINIDAD. 



79 



those whom the worthy of the world delight to 
honour. 

All of a piece, as regards veracity and pru- 
dence, is the further allegation of Mr. Froude's, 
to the effect that there was never any agitation 
for Reform in Trinidad before that which he 
passes under review. It is, however, a melan- 
choly fact, which we are ashamed to state, that 
Mr. Froude has written characteristically here 
also, either through crass ignorance or through 
deliberate malice. Any respectable, well- 
informed inhabitant of Trinidad, who hap- 
pened not to be an official " bird of passage," 
might, on our author's honest inquiry, have 
informed him that Trinidad is the land of 
chronic agitation for Reform. Mr. Froude 
might also have been informed that, even 
forty-five years ago, that is in 1843, an elective 
constitution, with all the electoral districts duly 
marked out, was formulated and transmitted by 
the leading inhabitants of Trinidad to the then 
Secretary of State for the Colonies. He might 
also have learnt that on every occasion that any 
of the shady Governors, whom he has so well 
depicted, manifested any excess of his un- 
desirable qualities, there has been a movement 



80 FROUDACITY. 

among the educated people in behalf of 
changing their country's political condition. 

We close this part of our review by reitera- 
ting our conviction that, come what will, the 
Crown Colony system, as at present managed, 
is doomed. Britain may, in deference to the 
alleged wishes of her impalpable " Anglo- West 
Indians " — whose existence rests on the au- 
thority of Mr. Froude alone — deny to Trinidad 
and other Colonies even the small modicum 
prayed for of autonomy, but in doing so the 
Mother Country will have to sternly revise her 
present methods of selecting and appointing 
Governors. As to the subordinate lot, they 
will have to be worth their salt when there is 
at the head of the Government a man who is 
truly deserving of his. 



Keqro Felicity j jm the Wejst 

IjMDIEg. 



We come now to the ingenious and novel 
fashion in which Mr. Froude carries out his 
investigations among the black population, and 
to his dogmatic conclusions concerning them. 
He says : — 

" In Trinidad, as everywhere else, my own 
chief desire was to see the human inhabitants, 
to learn what they were doing, how they were 
living, and what they were thinking about, and 
this could best be done by drives about the 
town and neighbourhood. " 

"Drives about the town and neighbourhood," 
indeed ! To learn and be able to depict with 
faithful accuracy what people " were doing, 
how they were living, and what they were 
thinking about " — all this being best done 
(domestic circumstances, nay, soul-workings 
and all!) through fleeting glimpses of shifting 

6 



82 FROUDACITY. 

panoramas of intelligent human beings ! What 
a bright notion ! We have here the suggestion 
of a capacity too superhuman to be accepted on 
trust, especially when, as in this case, it is by 
implication self-arrogated. The modesty of 
this thaumaturgic traveller in confining the 
execution of his detailed scrutiny of a whole 
community to the moderate progression of 
some conventional vehicle, drawn by some 
conventional quadruped or the other, does 
injustice to powers which, if possessed at 
all, might have compassed the same achieve- 
ment in the swifter transit of an express 
train, or, better still perhaps, from the em- 
pyrean elevation of a balloon ! Yet is Mr. 
Froude confident that data professed to be 
thus collected would easily pass muster with 
the readers of his book ! A confidence of this 
kind is abnormal, and illustrates, we think 
most fully, all the special characteristics of the 
man. With his passion for repeating, our 
author tells us in continuation of a strange 
rhapsody on Negro felicity : — 

" Once more, the earth does not contain any 
peasantry so well off, so well-cared for, so 
happy, so sleek and contented, as the sons 



NEGRO FELICITY IN THE WEST INDIES. 83 

and daughters of the emancipated slaves in 
the English West Indian Islands." 

Again : — 

" Under the rule of England, in these 
islands, the two millions of these brothers-in- 
law of ours are the most perfectly contented 
specimens of the human race to be found upon 
the planet. ... If happiness be the satisfac- 
tion of every conscious desire, theirs is a 
condition that admits of no improvement : 
were they independent, they might quarrel 
among themselves, and the weaker become 
the bondsmen of the stronger ; under the 
beneficent despotism of the English Govern- 
ment, which knows no difference of colour 
and permits no oppression, they can sleep, 
lounge, and laugh away their lives as they 
please, fearing no danger," &c. 

Now, then, let us examine for a while 
this roseate picture of Arcadian blissfulness 
said to be enjoyed by British West Indian 
Negroes in general, and by the Negroes 
of Trinidad in particular. " No distinction of 
colour " under the British rule, and, better still, 
absolute protection of the weaker against the 
stronger ! This latter consummation especially, 



84 FROUDACITY. 

Mr. Froude tells us, has been happily secured 
"under the beneficent despotism" of the 
Crown Colony system. However, let the 
above vague hyperboles be submitted to the 
test of practical experience, and the abstract 
government analysed in its concrete relations 
with the people. 

Unquestionably the actual and direct inter- 
position of the shielding authority above 
referred to, between man and man, is the 
immediate province of the Magistracy. All 
other branches of the Government, having in 
themselves no coercive power, must, from the 
supreme executive downwards, in cases of 
irreconcilable clashing of interests, have ulti- 
mate recourse to the magisterial jurisdiction. 
Putting aside, then, whatever culpable remiss- 
ness may have been manifested by magistrates 
in favour of powerful malfeasants, we would 
submit that the fact of stipendiary justices 
converting the tremendous, far-reaching powers 
which they wield into an engine of systematic 
oppression, ought to dim by many a shade 
the glowing lustre of Mr. Froude's encomiums. 
Facts, authentic and notorious, might be ad- 
duced in hundreds, especially with respect to 



NEGRO FELICITY IN THE WEST INDIES. 85 

the Port of Spain and San Fernando magis- 
stracies (both of which, since the administration 
of Sir J. R. Longden, have been exclusively 
the prizes of briefless English barristers J ) ? to 
prove that these gentry, far from being bul- 
warks to the weaker as against the stronger, 
have, in their own persons, been the direst 
scourges that the poor, particularly when 
coloured, have been afflicted by in aggravation 
of the difficulties of their lot. Only typical 
examples can here be given out of hundreds 
upon hundreds which might easily be cited and 
proved against the incumbents of the above- 
mentioned chief stipendiary magistracies. One 
such example was a matter of everyday dis- 
cussion at the time of Mr. Froude's visit. The 
inhabitants were even backed in their com- 
plaints by the Governor, who had, in response 
to their cry of distress, forwarded their prayer 

1 A West Indian official superstition professes to believe 
that a British barrister must make an exceptionally good 
colonial S J.P., seeing that he is ignorant of everything, save 
general English law, that would qualify him for the post ! 
In this, to acquit oneself tolerably, some acquaintance 
with the language, customs, and habits of thought of the 
population is everywhere else held to be of prime importance, 
— native conscientiousness and honesty of purpose being 
definitively presupposed. 



86 FROUDACITY. 

to the home authorities for relief from the 
hard treatment which they alleged themselves 
to be suffering at the hands of the then 
magistrate. Our allusion here is to the chief 
town, Port of Spain, the magistracy of which 
embraces also the surrounding districts, con- 
taining a total population of between 60,000 
and 70,000 souls. Mr. R. D. Mayne filled 
this responsible office during the latter years 
of Sir J. R. Longden's governorship. He 
was reputed, soon after his arrival, to have 
announced from the bench that in every case 
he would take the word of a constable in 
preference to the testimony of any one else. 
The Barbadian rowdies who then formed the 
major part of the constabulary of Trinidad, 
and whose bitter hatred of the older residents 
had been not only plainly expressed, but often 
brutally exemplified, rejoiced in the oppor- 
tunity thus afforded for giving effect to their 
truculent sentiments. At that time the bulk of 
the immigrants from Barbados were habitual 
offenders whom the Government there had 
provided with a free passage to wherever 
they elected to betake themselves. The more 
intelligent of the men flocked to the Trinidad 



NEGRO FELICITY IN THE WEST INDIES. 87 

police ranks, into which they were admitted 
generally without much inquiry into their ante- 
cedents. On this account they were shunned 
by the decent inhabitants, a course which they 
repaid with savage animosity. Perjuries the 
most atrocious and crushing, especially to the 
respectable poor, became the order of the day. 
Hundreds of innocent persons were committed 
to gaol and the infamy of convict servitude, with- 
out the possibility of escape from, or even mitiga- 
tion of, their ignominious doom. A respectable 
woman (a native of Barbados, too, who in the 
time of the first immigration of the better sort 
of her compatriots had made Trinidad her 
home) was one of the first victims of this 
iniquitous state of affairs. 

The class of people to which she belonged 
was noted as orderly, industrious and law- 
abiding, and, being so, it had identified itself 
entirely with the natives of the land of its 
adoption. This fact alone was sufficient to 
involve these immigrants in the same lot of 
persecution which their newly arrived country- 
men had organized and were carrying out 
against the Trinidadians proper. It happened 
that, on the occasion to which we wish par- 



88 FROUDACITY. 

ticularly to refer, the woman in question was 
at home, engaged in her usual occupation of 
ironing for her honest livelihood. Suddenly 
she heard a heavy blow in the street before her 
door, and almost simultaneously a loud scream, 
which, on looking hastily out, she perceived 
to be the cry of a boy of some ten or twelve 
years of age, who had been violently struck 
with the fist by another youth of larger size 
and evidently his senior in age. The smaller 
fellow had laid fast hold of his antagonist by 
the collar, and would not let go, despite the 
blows which, to extricate himself and in retalia- 
tion of the puny buffets of his youthful detainer, 
he "showered thick as wintry rain." 

The woman, seeing the posture of affairs, 
shouted to the combatants to desist, but to no 
purpose, rage and absorption in their wrathful 
occupation having deafened both to all external 
sounds. Seized with pity for the younger lad, 
who was getting so mercilessly the worst of it, 
the woman, hastily throwing a shawl over her 
shoulders, sprang into the street and rushed 
between the juvenile belligerents. Dexterously 
extricating the hand of the little fellow from the 
collar of his antagonist, she hurried the former 



NEGRO FELICITY IN THE WEST INDIES. 89 

into her gateway, shouting out to him at the 
same time to fasten the door on the inside. 
This the little fellow did, and no doubt gladly, 
as this surcease from actual conflict, short 
though it was, must have afforded space for the 
natural instinct of self-preservation to reassert 
itself. Hereupon the elder of the two lads, like 
a tiger robbed of his prey, sprang furiously to the 
gate, and began to use frantic efforts to force 
an entrance. Perceiving this, the woman (who 
meanwhile had not been idle with earnest dis- 
suasions and remonstrances, which had all 
proved futile) pulled the irate youngster back, 
and interposed her body between him and the 
gate, warding him off with her hands every 
time that he rushed forward to renew the 
assault. At length a Barbadian policeman hove 
in sight, and was hastily beckoned to by the 
poor ironer, who, by this time, had nearly come 
to the end of her strength. The uniformed 
" Bim " was soon on the spot ; but, without 
asking or waiting to hear the cause of the dis- 
turbance, he shouted to the volunteer peace- 
maker, " I see you are fighting : you are my 
prisoner!" Saying this, he clutched the poor 
thunderstruck creature by the wrist, and there 



go FROUDACITY. 

and then set about hurrying her off towards 
the police station. It happened, however, that 
the whole affair had occurred in the sight 
of a gentleman of well-known integrity. He, 
seated at a window overlooking the street, had 
witnessed the whole squabble, from its begin- 
ning in words to its culmination in blows ; so, 
seeing that the woman was most unjustly 
arrested, he went out and explained the cir- 
cumstances to the guardian of order. But to 
no purpose ; the poor creature was taken to the 
station, accompanied by the gentleman, who 
most properly volunteered that neighbourly 
turn. There she was charged with u obstruct- 
ing the policeman in the lawful execution of 
his duty." She was let out on bail, and next 
day appeared to answer the charge. 

Mr. Mayne, the magistrate, presided. The 
constable told his tale without any material 
deviation from the truth, probably confident, 
from previous experience, that his accusation 
was sufficient to secure a conviction. On the 
defendant's behalf, the gentleman referred to, 
who was well known to the magistrate him- 
self, was called, and he related the facts as we 
have above given them. Even Mr. Mayne 



NEGRO FELICITY IN THE WEST INDIES. 91 

could see no proof of the information, and 
this he confessed in the following qualified 
judgment : — 

" You are indeed very lucky, my good woman, 
that the constable has failed to prove his case 
against you ; otherwise you would have been 
sent to hard labour, as the ordinance provides, 
without the option of a fine. But as the case 
stands, you must pay a fine of £2 " ! ! ! 

Comment on this worse than scandalous 
decision would be superfluous. 

Another typical case, illustrative of the truth 
of Mr. Froude's boast of the eminent fair- 
play, nay, even the stout protection, that 
Negroes, and generally, " the weaker," have 
been wont to receive from British magistrates, 
may be related. 

An honest, hard-working couple, living in 
one of the outlying districts, cultivated a plot 
of ground, upon the produce of which they 
depended for their livelihood. After a time 
these worthy folk, on getting to their holding 
in the morning, used to find exasperating 
evidence of the plunder overnight of their 
marketable provisions. Determined to dis- 
cover the depredator, they concealed them- 



92 FROUDACITY. 

selves in the garden late one night, and 
awaited the result. By that means they 
succeeded in capturing the thief, a female, 
who, not suspecting their presence, had entered 
the garden, dug out some of the provisions, 
and was about to make off with her booty. In 
spite of desperate resistance, she was taken to 
the police station and there duly charged with 
larceny. Meanwhile her son, on hearing of 
his mother's incarceration, hastened to find 
her in her cell, and, after briefly consulting 
with her, he decided on entering a counter- 
charge of assault and battery against both her 
captors. Whether or not this bold proceeding 
was prompted by the knowledge that the dis- 
pensing of justice in the magistrate's court 
was a mere game of cross-purposes, a cynical 
disregard of common sense and elementary 
equity, we cannot say ; but the ultimate result 
fully justified this abnormal hardihood of filial 
championship. 

On the day of the trial, the magistrate 
heard the evidence on both sides, the case of 
larceny having been gone into first. For her 
defence, the accused confined herself to simple 
denials of the allegations against her, at the 



NEGRO FELICITY IN THE WEST INDIES. 9 3 

same time entertaining the court with a lachry- 
mose harangue about her rough treatment at 
the hands of the accusing parties. Finally, the 
decision of the magistrate was : that the 
prisoner be discharged, and the plundered goods 
restored to her ; and, as to the countercharge, 
that the husband and wife be imprisoned, the 
former for three and the latter for two months, 
with hard labour! When we add that there 
was, at that time, no Governor or Chief Justice 
accessible to the poorer and less intelligent 
classes, as is now the case (Sir Henry T. 
Irving and Sir Joseph Needham having 
been respectively superseded by Sir William 
Robinson and Sir John Gorrie), one can 
imagine what scope there was for similar 
exhibitions of the protecting energy of British 
rule. 

As we have already said, during Mr. 
Froude's sojourn in Trinidad the "sleek, 
happy, and contented" people, whose con- 
dition " admitted of no improvement," were 
yet groaning in bitter sorrow, nay, in abso- 
lute despair, under the crushing weight of 
such magisterial decisions as those which 
I have just recorded. Let me add two more 



94 



FROUDACITY. 



typical cases which occurred during Mr. 
Mayne's tenure of office in the island. 

L. B. was a member of one of those brawling 
sisterhoods that frequently disturbed the peace 
of the town of Port of Spain. She had a 
"pal" or intimate chum familiarly known as 
" Lady," who staunchly stood by her in all the 
squabbles that occurred with their adversaries. 
One particular night, the police were called to 
a street in the east of the town, in consequence 
of an affray between some women of the sort 
referred to. Arriving on the spot, they found 
the fight already over, but a war of words was 
still proceeding among the late combatants, 
of whom the aforesaid " Lady " was one of 
the most conspicuous. A list was duly made 
out of the parties found so engaged, and it 
included the name of L. B., who happened not 
to be there, or even in Port of Spain at all, 
she having some days before gone into the 
country to spend a little time with some 
relatives. The inserting of her name was an 
inferential mistake on the part of the police, 
arising from the presence of " Lady " at the 
brawl, she being well known by them to be 
the inseparable ally of L. B. on such occasions. 



NEGRO FELICITY IN THE WEST INDIES. 95 

It was not unnatural that in the obscurity they 
should have concluded that the latter was 
present with her altera ego, when in reality 
she was not there. 

The participants in the brawl were charged 
at the station, and summonses, including one 
to L. B., were duly issued. On her return 
to Port of Spain a day or two after the 
occurrence, the wrongly incriminated woman 
received from the landlady her key, along with 
the magisterial summons that had resulted from 
the error of the constables. The day of the 
trial came on, and L. B. stood before Mr. 
Mayne, strong in her innocence, and supported 
by the sworn testimony of her landlady as well 
as of her uncle from the country, with whom 
and with his family she had been uninter- 
ruptedly staying up to one or two days after 
the occurrence in which she had been thus 
implicated. The evidence of the old lady, 
who, like thousands of her advanced age in 
the Colony, had never even once had occa- 
sion to be present in any court of justice, was 
to the following effect : That the defendant, 
who was a tenant of hers, had, on a certain 
morning (naming days before the affray oc- 



96 FROUDACITY. 

curred), come up to her door well dressed, 
and followed by a porter carrying her luggage. 
L. B., she continued, then handed her the key 
of the apartment, informing her at the same 
time that she was going for some days into 
the country to her relatives, for a change, and 
requesting also that the witness should on no 
account deliver the key to any person who 
should ask for it during her absence. This wit- 
ness further deposed to receiving the summons 
from the police, which she placed along with 
the key for delivery to L. B. on the latter's 
return home. 

The testimony of the uncle was also 
decisively corroborative of that of the pre- 
ceding witness, as to the absence from Port 
of Spain of L. B. during the days embraced 
in the defence. The alibi was therefore 
unquestionably made out, especially as none 
of the police witnesses would venture to swear 
to having actually seen L. B. at the brawl. The 
magistrate had no alternative but that of acqui- 
escing in the proof of her innocence ; so he 
dismissed the charge against the accused, who 
stood down from among the rest, radiant with 
satisfaction. The other defendants were duly 



NEGRO FELICITY IN THE WEST INDIES. 97 

convicted, and sentenced to a term of imprison- 
ment with hard labour. All this was quite 
correct ; but here comes matter for considera- 
tion with regard to the immaculate dispensation 
of justice as vaunted so confidently by Mr. 
Froude. 

On receiving their sentence the women all 
stood down from the dock, to be escorted 
to prison, except " Lady," who, by the way, 
had preserved a rigid silence, while some of 
the other defendants had voluntarily and, it 
may be added, generously protested that L. B. 
was not present on the occasion of this par- 
ticular row. " Lady," whether out of affection 
or from a less respectable motive, cried out to 
the stipendiary justice : " But, sir, it ain't fair. 
How is it every time that L. B. and me come 
up before you, you either fine or send up the 
two of us together, and to-day you are sending 
me up alone?" Moved either by the logic or 
the pathos of this objurgation, the magistrate, 
turning towards L. B., who had lingered after 
her narrow escape to watch the issue of the 
proceedings, thus addressed her : — " L.B., upon 
second thoughts I order you to the same term 
of hard labour at the Royal Gaol with the 

7 



98 FROUDACITY. 

others." The poor girl, having neither money 
nor friends intelligent enough to interfere on 
her behalf, had to submit, and she underwent 
the whole of this iniquitous sentence. 

The last typical case that we shall give 
illustrates the singular application by this more 
than singular judge of the legal maxim caveat 
emptor. A free coolie possessed of a donkey 
resolved to utilize the animal in carting grass 
to the market. He therefore called on another 
coolie living at some distance from him, whom 
he knew to own two carts, a small donkey-cart 
and an ordinary cart for mule or horse. He 
proposed the purchase of the smaller cart, 
stating his reason for wishing to have it. The 
donkey-cart was then shown to the intending 
purchaser, who, along with two Creole witnesses 
brought by him to make out and attest the 
receipt on the occasion, found some of the iron 
fittings defective, and drew the vendor's atten- 
tion thereto. He, on his side, engaged, on re- 
ceiving the amount agreed to for the cart, to 
send it off to the blacksmith for immediate 
repairs, to be delivered to the purchaser next 
morning at the latest. On this understanding 
the purchase money was paid down, and the 



NEGRO FELICITY IN THE WEST INDIES. 99 

receipt, specifying that the sum therein men- 
tioned was for a donkey-cart, passed from the 
vendor to the purchaser of the little vehicle. 
Next day at about noon the man went with 
his donkey for the cart. Arrived there, his 
countryman had the larger of the two carts 
brought out, and in pretended innocence said 
to the purchaser of the donkey-cart, "Here 
is your cart." On this a warm dispute arose, 
which was not abated by the presence and 
protests of the two witnesses of the day before, 
who had hastily been summoned by the victim 
to bear out his contention that it was the 
donkey-cart and not the larger cart which had 
been examined, bargained for, purchased, and 
promised to be delivered, the day before. 

The matter, on account of the sturdiness 
of the rascal's denials, had to be referred to 
a court of law. The complainant engaged ar 
able solicitor, who laid the case before Mr. 
Mayne in all its transparent simplicity and 
strength. The defendant, although he had, 
and as a matter of fact could have, no means of 
invalidating the evidence of the two witnesses, 
and above all of his receipt with his signature, 
relied upon the fact that the cart which he 



ioo FRO UD A CITY. 

offered was much larger than the one the com- 
plainant had actually bought, and that therefore 
complainant would be the gainer by the trans- 
action. Incredible as it may sound, this view 
of the case commended itself to the magistrate, 
who adopted it in giving his judgment against 
the complainant. In vain did the solicitor 
protest that all the facts of the case were 
centred in the desire and intention of the 
prosecutor to have specifically a donkey-cart, 
which was abundantly proved by everything 
that had come out in the proceedings. In vain 
also was his endeavour to show that a man 
having only a donkey would be hopelessly 
embarrassed by having a cart for it which was 
entirely intended for animals of much larger 
size. The magistrate solemnly reiterated his 
decision, and wound up by saying that the 
victim had lost his case through disregard of the 
legal maxim caveat emptor — let the purchaser 
be careful. The rascally defendant thus gained 
his case, and left the court in defiant triumph. 

The four preceding cases are thoroughly 
significant of the original method in which 
thousands of cases were decided by this model 
magistrate, to the great detriment, pecuniary, 



NEGRO FELICITY IN THE WEST INDIES. 101 

social, and moral, during more than ten years, 
of between 60,000 and 70,000 of the popula- 
tion within the circle of his judicial authority. 
What shall we think, therefore, of the fairness 
of Mr. Froude or his informants, who, prompt 
and eager in imputing unworthy motives to 
gentlemen with characters above reproach, 
have yet been so silent with regard to the 
flagrant and frequent abuses of more than 
one of their countrymen by whom the honour 
and fair fame of their nation were for years 
draggled in the mire, and whose misdeeds were 
the theme of every tongue and thousands of 
newspaper-articles in the West Indian Colonies ? 

MR. ARTHUR CHILD, S.J.P. 

We now take San Fernando, the next most 
important magisterial district after Port of 
Spain. At the time of Mr. Froude's visit, and 
for some time before, the duties of the magis- 
tracy there were discharged by Mr. Arthur 
Child, an " English barrister " who, of course, 
had possessed the requisite qualification of being 
hopelessly briefless. For the ideal justice which 
Mr. Froude would have Britons believe is meted 
out to the weaker classes by their fellow-country- 



102 FROUDACITY. 

men in the West Indies, we may refer the reader 
to the conduct of the above-named functionary 
on the memorable occasion of the slaughter of the 
coolies under Governor Freeling, in October, 
1884. Mr. Child, as Stipendiary Justice, had 
the duty of reading the Riot Act to the immi- 
grants, who were marching in procession to the 
town of San Fernando, contrary, indeed, to the 
Government proclamation which had forbidden 
it ; and he it was who gave the order to "fire," 
which resulted fatally to many of the unfortu- 
nate devotees of Hosein. This mandate and its 
lethal consequences anticipated by some minutes 
the similar but far more death-dealing action 
of the Chief of Police, who was stationed at 
another post in the vicinity of San Fernando. 
The day after the shooting down of a total of 
more than one hundred immigrants, the pro- 
tecting action of this magistrate towards the 
weaker folk under his jurisdiction had a strik- 
ing exemplification, to which Mr. Froude is 
hereby made welcome. Of course there was a 
general cry of horror throughout the Colony, 
and especially in the San Fernando district, at 
the fatal outcome of the proclamation, which had 
mentioned only "fine" and "imprisonment," 



NEGRO FELICITY IN THE WEST INDIES. 103 

but not Death, as the penalty of disregarding 
its prohibitions. For nearly forty years, namely 
from their very first arrival in the Colony, the 
East Indian immigrants had, according to specific 
agreement with the Government, invariably been 
allowed the privilege of celebrating their annual 
feast of Hosein, by walking in procession with 
their pagodas through the public roads and 
streets of the island, without prohibition or 
hindrance of any kind from the authorities, 
save and except in cases where rival estate 
pagodas were in danger of getting into collision 
on the question of precedence. On such occa- 
sions the police, who always attended the pro- 
cessions, usually gave the lead to the pagodas 
of the labourers of estates according to their 
seniority as immigrants. 

In no case up to 1884, after thirty odd years' 
inauguration in the Colony, was the Hosein 
festival ever pretended to be any cause of 
danger, actual or prospective, to any town 
or building. On the contrary, business grew 
brisker and solidly improved at the approach 
of the commemoration, owing to the very con- 
siderable sale of parti-coloured paper, velvet, 
calico, and similar articles used in the construe- 



104 FROUDACITY. 

tion of the pagodas. Governor Freeling, how- 
ever, was, it may be presumed, compelled to 
see danger in an institution which had had 
nearly forty years' trial, without a single accident 
happening to warrant any sudden interposition 
of the Government tending to its suppression. 
At all events, the only action taken in 1884, in 
prospect of their usual festival, was to notify the 
immigrants by proclamation, and, it is said, also 
through authorized agents, that the details of 
their fete were not to be conducted in the 
usual manner ; and that their appearance with 
pagodas in any public road or any town, with- 
out special license from some competent local 
authority, would entail the penalty of so many 
pounds fine, or imprisonment for so many 
months with hard labour. The immigrants, to 
whom this unexpected change on the part of the 
authorities was utterly incomprehensible, both 
petitioned and sent deputations to the Gover- 
nor, offering guarantees for the, if possible, 
more secure celebration of the Hosein, and 
praying His Excellency to cancel the prohibi- 
tion as to the use of the roads, inasmuch as it in- 
terfered with the essential part of their religious 
rite, which was the "drowning," or casting into 



NEGRO FELICITY IN THE WEST INDIES. 105 

the sea, of the pagodas. Having utterly failed 
in their efforts with the Governor, the coolies 
resolved to carry out their religious duty ac- 
cording to prescriptive forms, accepting, at the 
same time, the responsibility in the way of fine 
or imprisonment which they would thus inevit- 
ably incur. A rumour was also current at 
the time that, pursuant to this resolution, the 
head men of the various plantations had autho- 
rized a general subscription amongst their 
countrymen, for meeting the contingency of 
fines in the police courts. All these things 
were the current talk of the population of San 
Fernando, in which town the leading immi- 
grants, free as well as indentured, had begun 
to raise funds for this purpose. 

All that the public, therefore, expected would 
have resulted from the intended infringement 
of the Proclamation was an enormous influx 
of money in the shape of fines into the 
Colonial Treasury ; as no one doubted the 
extreme facility which existed for ascertaining 
exactly, in the case of persons registered and 
indentured to specific plantations, the names 
and abodes of at least the chief offenders 
against the proclamation. Accordingly, on the 



io6 FROUDACITY. 

occurrence of the bloody catastrophe related 
above, every one felt that the mere persistence 
in marching all unarmed towards the town, 
without actually attempting to force their way 
into it, was exorbitantly visited upon the coolies 
by a violent death or a life-long mutilation. 
This sentiment few were at any pains to 
conceal ; but as the poorer and more ignorant 
classes can be handled with greater impunity 
than those who are intelligent and have the 
means of self-defence, Mr. Justice Child, the 
very day after the tragedy, and without waiting 
for the pro forma official inquiry into the 
tragedy in which he bore so conspicuous a part, 
actually caused to be arrested, sat to try and 
sent to hard labour, persons whom the police, 
in obedience to his positive injunctions, had 
reported to him as having condemned the 
shooting down of the immigrants ! Those who 
were arrested and thus summarily punished 
had, of course, no means of self-protection ; and 
as the case is typical of others, as illustrative of 
"justice-made law" applied to "subject races" 
in a British colony, Mr. Froude is free to accept 
it, or not, in corroboration of his unqualified 
panegyrics. 



NEGRO FEL1CI1Y IN THE WEST INDIES. 107 
MR. GROVE HUMPHREY CHAPMAN, S.J. P. 

As Stipendary Magistrate of this self-same 
San Fernando district, Grove Humphrey 
Chapman, Esquire (another English barrister), 
was the immediate predecessor of Mr. Child. 
More humane than Mr. Mayne, his colleague 
and contemporary in Port of Spain, this young 
magistrate began his career fairly well. But he 
speedily fell a victim to the influences immedi- 
ately surrounding him in his new position. His 
head, which later events proved never to have 
been naturally strong, began to be turned by 
the unaccustomed deference which he met with 
on all hands, from high and low, official and 
non-official, and he himself soon consummated 
the addling of his brain by persistent practical 
revolts against every maxim of the ancient 
Nazarenes in the matter of potations. His 
decisions at the court, therefore, became perfect 
emulations of those of Mr. Mayne, as well in 
perversity as in harshness, and many in his case 
also were the appeals for relief made to the 
head of the executive by the inhabitants of the 
district — but of course in vain. Governor Irving 
was at this time in office, and the unfortunate 



108 FROUDACITY. 

victims of perverse judgments — occasionally- 
pronounced by this magistrate in his cups — 
were only poor Negroes, coolies, or other 
persons whose worldly circumstances placed 
them in the category of the " weaker " in the 
community. To these classes of people that 
excellent ruler unhappily denied — we dare not 
say his personal sympathy, but — the official 
protection which, even through self-respect, 
he might have perfunctorily accorded. Bent, 
however, on running through the whole gamut 
of extravagance, Mr. Chapman — by interpreting 
official impunity into implying a direct license 
for the wildest of his caprices — plunged head- 
long with ever accelerating speed, till the 
deliverance of the Naparimas became the 
welcome consequence of his own personal 
action. On one occasion it was credibly 
reported in the Colony that this infatuated 
dispenser of British justice actually stretched 
his official complaisance so far as to permit a 
lady not only to be seated near him on the 
judicial bench, but also to take a part — loud, 
boisterous and abusive — in the legal proceed- 
ings of the day. Meanwhile, as the Governor 
could not be induced to interfere, things went 



NEGRO FELICITY IN THE WEST INDIES. 109 

on from bad to worse, till one day, as above 
hinted, the unfortunate magistrate so publicly 
committed himself as to be obliged to be 
borne for temporary refuge to the Lunatic 
Asylum, whence he was clandestinely shipped 
from the Colony on " six months' leave of 
absence," never more to resume his official 
station. 

The removal of two such magistrates 
as those whose careers we have so briefly 
sketched out — Mr. Mayne having died, still 
a magistrate, since Mr. Froude's departure 
— has afforded opportunity for the restoration 
of British protecting influence. In the person 
of Mr. Llewellyn Lewis, as magistrate of 
Port of Spain, this opportunity has been 
secured. He, it is generally rumoured, strives 
to justify the expectations of fair play and even- 
handed justice which are generally entertained 
concerning Englishmen. It is, however, certain 
that with a Governor so prompt to hear the cry 
of the poor as Sir William Robinson has proved 
himself to be, and with a Chief Justice so 
vigilant, fearless, and painstaking as Sir John 
Gorrie, the entire magistracy of the Colony 
must be so beneficially influenced as to preclude 



no FROUDACITY. 

the frequency of appeals being made to the 
higher courts, or it may be to the Executive, on 
account of scandalously unjust and senseless 
decisions. 

So long, too, as the names of T. S. Warner, 
Captain Larcom, and F. H. Hamblin abide in 
the grateful remembrance of the entire popula- 
tion, as ideally upright, just, and impartial 
dispensers of justice, each in his own jurisdiction, 
we can only sigh at the temporal dispensation 
which renders practicable the appointment and 
retention in office of such administrators of the 
Law as were Mr. Mayne and Mr. Chapman. 
The widespread and irreparable mischiefs 
wrought by these men still affect disastrously 
many an unfortunate household ; and the 
execration by the weaker in the community 
of their memory, particularly that of Robert 
Dawson Mayne, is only a fitting retribution 
for their abuse of power. 



BOOK III. 



j3ogia;l Revolution 



Never was the Knight of La Mancha more 
convinced of his imaginary mission to re- 
dress the wrongs of the world than Mr. 
James Anthony Froude seems to be of his 
ability to alter the course of events, especially 
those bearing on the destinies of the Negro 
in the British West Indies. The doctrinaire 
style of his utterances, his sublime indifference 
as to what Negro opinion and feelings 
may be, on account of his revelations, are 
uniquely charming." In that portion of his 
book headed "Social Revolution" our author, 
with that mixture of frankness and cynicism 
which is so dear to the soul of the British 
esprit fort of to-day, has challenged a com- 
parison between British Colonial policy on the 

8 



ii4 FROUDACITY. 

one hand, and the Colonial policy of France 
and Spain on the other. This he does with an 
evident recklessness that his approval of Spain 
and France involves a definite condemnation 
of his own country. However, let us hear 
him : — 

"The English West Indies, like other parts 
of the world, are going through a silent revolu- 
tion. Elsewhere the revolution, as we hope, is 
a transition state, a new birth ; a passing away 
of what is old and worn out, that a fresh and 
healthier order may rise in its place. In the 
West Indies the most sanguine of mortals 
will find it difficult to entertain any such hope 
at all" 

As Mr. Froude is speaking dogmatically 
here of his, or rather our, West Indies, let 
us hear him as he proceeds : — 

" We have been a ruling power there for two 
hundred and fifty years ; the whites whom we 
planted as our representatives are drifting into 
ruin, and they regard England and England's 
policy as the principal cause of it. The blacks 
whom, in a fit of virtuous benevolence, we eman- 
cipated, do not feel particularly obliged to us. 
They think, if they think at all, that they were 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 115 

ill-treated originally, and have received no 
more than was due to them." 

Thus far. Now, as to " the whites whom we 
planted as our representatives" and who, Mr, 
Froude avers, are drifting into ruin, we confess 
to a total ignorance of their whereabouts in 
these islands in this jubilee year of Negro 
Emancipation. Of the representatives of 
Britain immediately before and after Emanci- 
pation we happen to know something, which, 
on the testimony of Englishmen, Mr. Froude 
will be made quite welcome to before our task 
is ended. With respect to Mr. Froude's state- 
ment as to the ingratitude of the emancipated 
Blacks, if it is aimed at the slaves who were 
actually set free, it is utterly untrue ; for no class 
of persons, in their humble and artless way, 
are more attached to the Queen's majesty, 
whom they regard as incarnating in her 
gracious person the benevolence which Mr. 
Froude so jauntily scoffs at. But if our censor's 
remark under this head is intended for the 
present generation of Blacks, it is a pure and 
simple absurdity. What are we Negroes of 
the present day to be grateful for to the us, 
personified by Mr. Froude and the Colonial 



n6 FROUDACITY. 

Office exportations ? We really believe, from 
what we know of Englishmen, that very 
few indeed would regard Mr. Froude's re- 
proach otherwise than as a palpable adding 
of insult to injury. Obliged to " us," indeed! 
Why, Mr. Froude, who speaks of us as dogs 
and horses, suggests that the same kindliness 
of treatment that secures the attachment of 
those noble brutes would have the same result 
in our case. With the same consistency that 
marks his utterances throughout his book, he 
tells his readers "that there is no original or 
congenital difference between the capacity of 
the White and the Negro races." He adds, too, 
significantly : " With the same chances and with 
the same treatment, I believe that distinguished 
men would be produced equally from both 
races." After this truthful testimony, which 
Pelion upon Ossa of evidence has confirmed, 
does Mr. Froude, in the fatuity of his skin- 
pride, believe that educated men, worthy of the 
name, would be otherwise than resentful, if not 
disgusted, at being shunted out of bread in 
their own native land, which their parents' 
labours and taxes have made desirable, in 
order to afford room to blockheads, vulgarians, 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. u 7 

or worse, imported from beyond the seas ? 
Does Mr. Froude's scorn of the Negroes' skin 
extend, inconsistently on his part, to their intelli- 
gence and feelings also ? And if so, what has 
the Negro to care — if let alone and not 
wantonly thwarted in his aspirations ? It 
sounds queer, not to say unnatural and scanda- 
lous, that Englishmen should in these days of 
light be the champions of injustice towards 
their fellow-subjects, not for any intellectual 
or moral disqualification, but on the simple 
account of the darker skin of those who are 
to be assailed and thwarted in their life's 
career and aspirations. Really, are we to be 
grateful that the colour difference should be 
made the basis and justification of the dastardly 
denials of justice, social, intellectual, and 
moral, which have characterized the rdgime of 
those who Mr. Froude boasts were left to 
be the representatives of Britain's morality 
and fair play ? Are the Negroes under the 
French flag not intensely French ? Are the 
Negroes under the Spanish flag not intensely 
Spanish ? Wherefore are they so ? It is 
because the French and Spanish nations, who 
are neither of them inferior in origin or the 



n8 FRO UD A CITY. 

nobility of the part they have each played 
on the historic stage, have had the dignity 
and sense to understand the lowness of moral 
and intellectual consciousness implied in the 
subordination of questions of an imperial 
nature to the slaveholder's anxiety about the 
hue of those who are to be benefited or not 
in the long run. By Spain and France every 
loyal and law-abiding subject of the Mother 
Country has been a citizen deemed worthy all 
the rights, immunities, and privileges flowing 
from good and creditable citizenship. Those 
meriting such distinction were taken into the 
bosom of the society which their qualifications 
recommended them to share, and no office 
under the Government has been thought too 
good or too elevated for men of their stamp. 
No wonder, then, that Mr. Froude is silent 
regarding the scores of brilliant coloured 
officials who adorn the civil service of France 
and Spain, and whose appointment, in contrast 
with what has usually been the case in British 
Colonies, reflects an abiding lustre on those 
countries, and establishes their right to a fore- 
most place among nations. 

Mr. Froude, in speaking of Chief Justice 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 119 

Reeves, ventures upon a smart truism which 
we can discuss for him, but of course not in the 
sense in which he has meant it. " Exceptions," 
our author remarks, " are supposed proverbially 
to prove nothing, or to prove the very opposite 
of what they appear to prove. When a par- 
ticular phenomenon occurs rarely, the pro- 
babilities are strong against the recurrence of 
it." Now, is it in ignorance, or through dis- 
ingenuousness, that Mr. Froude has penned 
this argument regarding exceptions ? Surely, 
in the vast area of American life, it is not 
possible that he could see Frederick Douglass 
alone out of the cluster of prominent Black 
Americans who are doing the work of their 
country so worthily and so well in every official 
department. Anyhow, Mr. Froude's history of 
the Emancipation may here be amended for 
him by a reminder that, in the British Colonies, 
it was not Whites as masters, and Blacks as 
slaves, who were affected by that momentous 
measure. In fact, 1838 found in the British 
Colonies very nearly as many Negro and 
Mulatto slave-owners as there were white. 
Well then, these black and yellow planters 
received their quota, it may be presumed, of 



i2o FROUDACITY. 

the ^20,000,000 sterling indemnity. They 
were part and parcel of the proprietary body 
in the Colonies, and had to meet the crisis 
like the rest. They were very wealthy, some 
of these Ethiopic accomplices of the oppressors 
of their own race. Their sons and daughters 
were sent, like the white planter's children, 
across the Atlantic for a European education. 
These young folk returned to their various 
native Colonies as lawyers and doctors. Many 
of them were also wealthy planters. The 
daughters, of course, became in time the 
mothers of the new generation of prominent 
inhabitants. Now, in America all this was dif- 
ferent. No " nigger," however alabaster fair, 
was ever allowed the privileges of common 
citizenship, let alone the right to hold property 
in others. If possessed by a weakness to pass 
for white men, as very many of them could 
easily have contrived to do, woe unto the poor 
impostors ! They were hunted down from city 
to city as few felons would be, and finally 
done to death — " serve them right ! " being 
the grim commentary regarding their fate for 
having sought to usurp the ineffable privilege 
of whitemanship ! All this, Mr. Froude, was 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 121 

the rule, the practice, in America, with regard 
to persons of colour up to twenty-five years 
ago. Now, sir, what is the phenomenon which 
strikes your vision in that mighty Republic 
to-day, with regard to those self-same despised, 
discountenanced, persecuted and harried de- 
scendants of Ham ? We shall tell you of the 
change that has taken place in their condition, 
and also some of the reasons of that bene- 
ficent revolution. 

The Proclamation of Emancipation on Janu- 
ary 1 st, 1863, was, by President Lincoln, frankly 
admitted to have been a war necessity. No 
abstract principle of justice or of morals was 
of primary consideration in the matter. The 
saving of the Union at any cost, — that is, the 
stern political emergency forced forth the 
document which was to be the social salvation 
of every descendant of Ham in the United 
States of America. Close upon the heels of 
their emancipation, the enfranchisement of the 
Negroes was pushed forward by the thorough- 
going American statesmen. They had no sen- 
timentality to defer to. The logic of events — 
the fact not only of the coloured race being 
freedmen, but also of their having been effec- 



122 FROUDACITY. 

tive comrades on the fields of battle, where the 
blood of eager thousands of them had flowed 
on the Union side, pointed out too plainly 
that men with such claims should also be 
partners in the resulting triumph. 

Mr. Froude, being so deferential to skin- 
prejudice, will doubtless find it strange that 
such a measure as the Civil Rights Bill 
should have passed a Congress of Americans. 
Assuredly with the feeling against the coloured 
race which custom and law had engrafted into 
the very nature of the vast majority, this 
was a tremendous call to make on the national 
susceptibilities. But it has been exactly this 
that has brought out into such vivid contrast 
the conduct of the British statesman, loudly 
professing to be unprejudiced as to colour, 
and fair and humane, on the one hand, and, on 
the other hand, the dealings of the politicians of 
America, who had, as a matter of fact, sucked in 
aversion and contempt towards the Negro to- 
gether with their mother s milk. Of course no 
sane being could expect that feelings so deeply 
ingrained and nourished could be rooted out 
by logic or by any legislative enactment. 
But, indeed, it is sublimely creditable to 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 123 

the American Government that, whatever 
might be the personal and private sentiments 
of its individual members as regards race, 
palmam ferat qui meruit— -"let him bear the 
palm who has deserved it"— has been their 
motto in dealing generally with the claims 
of their Ethiopic fellow-citizens. Hence it is 
that in only twenty-five years America can 
show Negro public officers as thick as black- 
berries, while Mr. Froude can mention only 
Mr. Justice Reeves in fifty years as a sample 
of the " exceptional " progress under British 
auspices of a man of African descent ! Verily, 
if in fifty long years British policy can recog- 
nize only one single exception in a race be- 
tween which and the white race there is no 
original or congenital difference of capacity, the 
inference must be that British policy has been 
not only systematically, but also too successfully, 
hostile to the advancement of the Ethiopians 
subject thereto ; while the " fair field and no 
favour" management of the strong-minded 
Americans has, by its results, confirmed the 
culpability of the English policy in its relation 
to " subject races." 

The very suggestive section of " the English 



i2 4 FROUDACITY. 

in the West Indies," from which we have 
already given extracts, and which bears the title 
" Social Revolution," thus proceeds : — 

" But it does not follow that what can be 
done eventually can be done immediately, and 
the gulf which divides the colours is no arbi- 
trary prejudice, but has been opened by the 
centuries of training and discipline which have 
given us the start' in the race " (p. 125). 

The reference in the opening clause of the 
above citation, as to what is eventually possible 
not being immediately feasible, is to the eleva- 
tion of Blacks to high official posts, such as 
those occupied by Judge Reeves in Barbados, 
and by Mr. F. Douglass in the United States. 
We have already disposed by anticipation of 
the above contention of Mr. Froude's, by 
showing that in only twenty-five years America 
has found hundreds of eminent Blacks to fill 
high posts under her government. Our au- 
thor's futile mixture of Judge Reeves' excep- 
tional case with that of Fred. Douglass, which 
he cunningly singles out from among so many 
in the United States, is nothing but a subter- 
fuge, of the same queer and flimsy description 
with which the literature of the cause now cham- 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION, 125 

pioned by his eloquence has made the world only 
too familiar. What can Mr. Froude conceive 
any sane man should see in common between 
the action of British and of American statesman- 
ship in the matter now under discussion ? If 
his utterance on this point is that of a British 
spokesman, let him abide by his own verdict 
against his own case, as embodied in the words, 
" the gulf which divides the two colours is no 
arbitrary prejudice," which, coupled with his 
contention that the elevation of the Blacks is 
not immediately feasible, discloses the wideness 
of divergence between British and American 
political opinion on this identical subject. 

Mr. Froude is pathetically eloquent on the 
colour question. He tells of the wide gulf 
between the two colours — we suppose it is as 
wide as exists between his white horse and his 
black horse. Seriously, however, does not this 
kind of talk savour only too much of the slave- 
pen and the auction-block of the rice-swamp 
and the cotton-field ; of the sugar-plantation 
and the driver's lash ? In the United States 
alone, among all the slave-holding Powers, was 
the difference of race and colour invoked openly 
and boldly to justify all the enormities that 



126 FROUDACITY. 

were the natural accompaniments of those 
" institutions " of the Past. But is Mr. Froude 
serious in invoking the ostracizing of inno- 
cent, loyal, and meritorious British subjects 
on account of their mere colour ? Physical 
slavery — which was no crime per se, Mr. Froude 
tells us — had at least overwhelming brute 
power, and that silent, passive force which is 
even more potential as an auxiliary, viz., unen- 
lightened public opinion, whose neutrality is too 
often a positive support to the empire of wrong. 
But has Mr. Froude, in his present wild pro- 
paganda on behalf of political and, therefore, 
of social repression, anything analogous to those 
two above-specified auxiliaries to rely on ? We 
trow not. Then why this frantic bluster and 
shouting forth of indiscreet aspirations on be- 
half of a minority to whom accomplished facts, 
when not agreeable to or manipulated by them- 
selves, are a perpetual grievance, generating 
life-long impotent protestations ? Presumably 
there are possibilities the thoughts of which 
fascinate our author and his congeners in this, 
to our mind, vain campaign in the cause of 
social retrogression. But, be the incentives 
what they may, it might not be amiss on our 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 127 

part to suggest to those impelled by them that 
the ignoring of Negro opinion in their calcula- 
tions, though not only possible but easily prac- 
tised fifty years ago, is a portentous blunder at 
the present time. Verbum sapienti. 

Mr. Froude must see that he has set about his 
Negro-repression campaign in too blundering a 
fashion. He evidently expects to be able to 
throw dust into the eyes of the intelligent world, 
juggler-wise, through the agency of the mighty 
pronoun US, as representing the entire Anglo- 
Saxon race, in his advocacy of the now scarcely 
intelligible pretensions of a little coterie of Her 
Majesty's subjects in the West Indies. These 
gentry are hostile, he urges, to the presence of 
progressive Negroes on the soil of the tropics ! 
Yet are these self-same Negroes not only 
natives, but active improvers and embellishers 
of that very soil. We cannot help concluding 
that this impotent grudge has sprung out of the 
additional fact that these identical Negroes con- 
stitute also a living refutation of the sinister 
predictions ventured upon generally against their 
race, with frantic recklessness, even within the 
last three decades, by affrighted slave-holders, 
of whose ravings Mr. Froude's book is only a 



128 FROUDACITY. 

diluted echo, out of season and outrageous to 
the conscience of modern civilization. 

It is patent, then, that the matters which Mr. 
Froude has sought to force up to the dignity of 
genetic rivalship, has nothing of that importance 
about it. His us, between whom and the 
Negro subjects of Great Britain the gulf of 
colour lies, comprises, as he himself owns, an 
outnumbered and, as we hope to prove later on, 
a not over-creditable little clique of Anglo-Saxon 
lineage. The real US who have started ahead 
of the Negroes, " through the training and disci- 
pline of centuries," are assuredly not anything 
like " represented " by the few pretentious incap- 
ables who, instead of conquering predominance, 
as they who deserve it always do, like men, are 
whimpering like babies after dearly coveted 
but utterly unattainable enjoyments — to be 
had at the expense of the interests of the 
Negroes whom they, rather amusingly, affect to 
despise. When Mr. Froude shall have become 
able to present for the world's contemplation 
a question respecting which the Anglo-Saxon 
family, in its grand world-wide predominance, 
and the African family, in its yet feeble, albeit 
promising, incipience of self-adjustment, shall 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 129 

actually be competitors, then, and only then, 
will it be time to accept the outlook as serious. 
But when, as in the present case, he invokes 
the whole prestige of the Anglo-Saxon race in 
favour of the untenable pretensions of a few 
blasts of that race, and that to the social and 
political detriment of tens of thousands of black 
fellow-subjects, it is high time that the common 
sense of civilization should laugh him out of 
court. The us who are flourishing, or pining, 
as the case may be, in the British West Indies 
—by favour of the Colonial Office on the former 
hypothesis, or, on the second, through the mis- 
direction of their own faculties — do not, and, in 
the very nature of things, cannot in any race 
take the lead of any set of men endowed with 
virile attributes, the conditions of the contest 
being on all sides identical. 

Pass we onward to extract and comment on 
other passages in this very engaging section of 
Mr. Froude's book. On the same page (125) 
he says : — 

" The African Blacks have been free enough 
tor thousands, perhaps for ten thousands of years, 
and it has been the absence of restraint which 
has prevented them from becoming civilized." 

9 



130 FROUDACITY. 

All this, perhaps, is quite true, and, in the 
absence of positive evidence to the contrary of 
our author's dogmatic assertions, we save time 
by allowing him all the benefit he can derive 
from whatever weight they might carry. 

" Generation has followed generation, and the 
children are as like their fathers as the suc- 
cessive generations of apes." 

To this we can have nothing to object ; 
especially in view of what the writer goes on to 
say, and that on his own side of the hedge — 
somewhat qualified though his admission may 
be : — " The whites, it is likely enough, succeeded 
one another with the same similarity for a series 
of ages." Our speculator grows profoundly 
philosophic here ; and in this mood thus enter- 
tains his readers in a strain which, though deep, 
we shall strive to find clear : — 

"It is now supposed that human race has 
been on the planet for a hundred thousand 
years at least ; and the first traces of civilization 
cannot be thrown back at furthest beyond six 
thousand. During all this time mankind went 
on treading in the same steps, century after 
century making no more advance than the 
birds and beasts." 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 131 

In all this there is nothing that can usefully 
be taken exception to ; for speculation and con- 
jecture, if plausible and attractive, are free to 
revel whenever written documents and the 
unmistakable indications of the earth's crust 
are both entirely at fault. Warming up with his 
theme, Mr. Froude gets somewhat ambiguous 
in the very next sentence. Says he : — 

" In Egypt or India or one knows not where, 
accident or natural development quickened into 
life our moral and intellectual faculties ; and 
these faculties have grown into what we now 
experience, not in the freedom in which the 
modern takes delight, but under the sharp rule 
of the strong over the weak, of the wise over 
the unwise." 

Our author, as we see, begins his above 
quoted deliverance quite at a loss with regard 
to the agency to which the incipience, growth, 
and fructification of man's faculties should be 
attributed. " Accident," " natural development," 
he suggests, quickened the human faculties into 
the progressive achievements which they have 
accomplished. But then, wherefore is this writer 
so forcible, so confident in his prophecies regard- 
ing Negroes and their future temporal condition 



132 FROUDACITY. 

and proceedings, since it is "accident," and " acci- 
dent" only, that must determine their fulfilment ? 
Has he so securely bound the fickle divinity 
to his service as to be certain of its agency 
in the realization of his forecasts ? And if so, 
where then would be the fortuitousness that 
is the very essence of occurrences that glide, 
undesigned, unexpected, unforeseen, into the 
domain of Fact, and become material for His- 
tory ? So far as we feel capable of intelli- 
gently meditating on questions of this inscru- 
table nature, we are forced to conclude that 
since " natural development" could be so re- 
gular, so continuous, and withal so efficient, in 
the production of the marvellous results that 
we daily contemplate, there must be existent 
and in operation — as, for instance, in the case 
of the uniformity characterizing for ages suc- 
cessive generations of mankind, as above ad- 
duced by our philosopher himself — some con- 
trolling law, according and subject to which no 
check has marred the harmonious progression, 
or prevented the consummations that have 
crowned the normal exercise of human energy, 
intellectual as well as physical. 

" The sharp rule of the strong over the 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 133 

weak!' is the first clause of the Carlylean- 
sounding phrase which embodies the requisite 
conditions for satisfactory human development. 
The terms expressive of these conditions, how- 
ever, while certainly suggesting and embracing 
the beneficent, elevating influence and discipline 
of European civilization, such as we know and 
appreciate it, do not by any means exclude the 
domination of Mr. Legree or any other typical 
man-monster, whose power over his fellow- 
creatures is at once a calamity to the victims 
and a disgrace to the community tolerating not 
only its exercise, but the very possibility of its 
existence. The sharp rule of " the wise over 
the ttnwise" is the closing section of the 
recommendation to ensure man's effective de- 
velopment. Not even savages hesitate to defer 
in all their important designs to the sought-for 
guidance of superior judgments. But in the 
case of us West Indian Blacks, to whom Mr. 
Froude's doctrine here has a special reference, 
is it suggested by him that the bidders for pre- 
dominance over us on the purely epidermal, the 
white skin, ground, are ipso facto the monopolists 
of directing wisdom ? It surely cannot be so ; for 
Mr. Froude's own chapters regarding both the 



134 FROUDACTTY. 

nomination by Downing Street of future Colonial 
office-holders and the disorganized mental and 
moral condition of the indigenous representa- 
tives — as he calls them ! — of his country in these 
climes, preclude the possibility that the reference 
regarding the wise can be to them. Now since 
this is so, we really cannot see why the pains 
should have been taken to indite the above 
truism, to the truth whereof, under every 
normal or legitimate circumstance, the veriest 
barbarian, by spontaneously resorting to and 
cheerfully abiding by it, is among the first to 
secure practical effect. 

" Our own Anglo-Saxon race," continues our 
author, "has been capable of self-government 
only after a thousand years of civil and spiritual 
authority. European government, European 
instruction, continued steadily till his natural 
tendencies are superseded by higher instincts, 
may shorten the probation period of the negro. 
Individual blacks of exceptional quality, like 
Frederick Douglass in America, or the Chief 
Justice of Barbados, will avail themselves of 
opportunities to rise, and the freest opportunity 
ought to be offered them." Here we are re- 
minded of the dogma laid down by a certain 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 135 

class of ethnologists, to the effect that intellec- 
tuality, when displayed by a person of mixed 
European and African blood, must always be 
assigned to the European side of the parentage ; 
and in the foregoing citation our author speaks 
of two personages undoubtedly belonging to the 
class embraced in the above dogma. Three 
specific objections may, therefore, be urged 
against the statements which we have indicated 
in the above quotation. First and foremost, 
neither Judge Reeves nor Mr. Fred Douglass 
is a black man, as Mr. Froude inaccurately 
represents each of them to be. The former is of 
mixed blood, to what degree we are not adepts 
enough to determine ; and the latter, if his 
portrait and those who have personally seen 
him mislead us not, is a decidedly fair man. 
We, of course, do not for a moment imagine 
that either of those eminent descendants of 
Ham cares a jot about the settlement of this 
question, which doubtless would appear very 
trivial to both. But as our author's crusade is 
against the Negro — by which we understand the 
undiluted African descendant, the pure Negro, 
as he singularly describes Chief justice Reeves 
— our anxiety is to show that there exist, both 



136 FROUDACITY. 

in the West Indies and in the United States, 
scores of genuine black men to whom neither 
of these two distinguished patriots would, for 
one instant, hesitate to concede any claim to 
equality in intellectual and social excellence. 
The second exception which we take is, as we 
have already shown in a previous page, to 
the persistent lugging in of America by Mr. 
Froude, doubtless to keep his political country- 
men in countenance with regard to the Negro 
question. We have already pointed out the 
futility of this proceeding on our author's part, 
and suggested how damaging it might prove to 
the cause he is striving to uphold. " Blacks of 
exceptional quality," like the two gentlemen he 
has specially mentioned, " will avail themselves 
of opportunities to rise." Most certainly they 
willy Mr. Froude — but, for the present, only in 
America, where those opportunities are really 
free and open to all. There no parasitical non- 
workers are to be found, eager to eat bread, 
but in the sweat of other people's brows ; no 
impecunious title-bearers ; no importunate bores, 
nor other similar characters whom the Govern- 
ment there would regard it as their duty " to 
provide for " — by^quartering them on the reve- 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 137 

nues of Colonial dependencies. But in the 
British Crown — or rather " Anglo-West Indian " 
— governed Colonies, has it ever been, can it 
ever be, thus ordered ? Our author's descrip- 
tion of the exigencies that compel injustice to 
be done in order to requite, or perhaps to secure, 
Parliamentary support, coupled with his account 
of the bitter animus against the coloured race 
that rankles in the bosom of his " Englishmen 
in the West Indies," sufficiently proves the utter 
hypocrisy of his recommendation, that the freest 
opportunities should be offered to Blacks of the 
said exceptional order. The very wording of 
Mr. Froude's recommendation is disingenuous. 
It is one stone sped at two birds, and which, 
most naturally, has missed them both. 

Mr. Froude knew perfectly well that, twenty- 
five years before he wrote his book, America 
had thrown open the way to public advance 
ment to the Blacks, as it had been previously 
free to Whites alone. His use of " should be 
offered," instead of "are offered," betrays his 
consciousness that, at the time he was writing, 
the offering of any opportunities of the kind 
he suggests was a thing still to be desired 
ander British jurisdiction. The third objec- 



138 FROUDACITY. 

tion which we shall take to Mr. Froude's bracket- 
ing of the cases of Mr. Fred Douglass and of 
Judge Reeves together, is that, when closely 
examined, the two cases can be distinctly seen 
to be not in any way parallel. The applause 
which our author indirectly bids for on behalf 
of British Colonial liberality in the instance of 
Mr. Reeves would be the grossest mockery, if 
accorded in any sense other than we shall pro- 
ceed to show. Fred Douelass was born and 
bred a slave in one of the Southern States of 
the Union, and regained his freedom by flight 
from bondage, a grown man, and, of course, 
under the circumstances, solitary and destitute. 
He reached the North at a period when the 
prejudice of the Whites against men of his race 
was so rampant as to constitute a positive 
mania. 

The stern and cruelly logical doctrine, that a 
Negro had no rights which white men were 
bound to respect, was in full blast and practical 
exemplification. Yet amidst it all, and despite 
of it all, this gifted fugitive conquered his way 
into the Temple of Knowledge, and became 
eminent as an orator, a writer, and a lecturer 
on political and general subjects. Hailed abroad 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 139 

as a prodigy, and received with acclamation into 
the brotherhood of intelligence, abstract justice 
and moral congruity demanded that such a man 
should no longer be subject to the shame and 
abasement of social, legal, and political proscrip- 
tion. The land of his birth proved herself 
equal to this imperative call of civilized Duty, 
regardless of customs and the laws, written as 
well as unwritten, which had doomed to life-long 
degradation every member of the progeny of 
Ham. Recognizing in the erewhile bondman 
a born leader of men, America, with the un- 
flinching directness that has marked her course, 
whether in good or in evil, responded with 
spontaneous loyalty to the inspiration of her 
highest instincts. Shamed into compunction 
and remorse at the solid fame and general 
sympathy secured for himself by a son of her 
soil, whom, in the wantonness of pride and 
power, she had denied all fostering care (not, 
indeed, for any conscious offending on his part, 
but by reason of a natural peculiarity which she 
had decreed penal), America, like a repentant 
mother, stooped from her august seat, and 
giving with enthusiasm both hands to the out- 
cast, she helped him to stand forward and erect, 



140 FROUDACITY. 

in the dignity of untrammeled manhood, making 
him, at the same time, welcome to a place of 
honour amongst the most gifted, the worthiest 
and most favoured of her children. 

Chief Justice Reeves, on the other hand, did 
not enter the world, as Douglass had done, heir 
to a lot of intellectual darkness and legalized 
social and political proscription. Associated 
from adolescence with S.J. Prescod, the greatest 
leader of popular opinion whom Barbados has 
yet produced, Mr. Reeves possessed in his 
nature the material to assimilate and reflect in 
his own principles and conduct the salient 
characteristics of his distinguished Mentor. 
Arrived in England to study law, he had there 
the privilege of the personal acquaintance of 
Lord Brougham, then one of the Nestors of the 
great Emancipation conflict. On returning to 
his native island, which he did immediately 
after his call to the bar, Mr. Reeves sprung at 
once into the foremost place, and retained his 
precedence till his labours and aspirations were 
crowned by his obtaining the highest judicial 
post in that Colony. For long years before 
becoming Chief Justice, Mr. Reeves had con- 
quered for himself the respect and confidence 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 141 

of all Barbadians — even including the ultra 
exclusive " Anglo-West-Indians " of Mr. Froude 
— by the manful constitutional stand which, 
sacrificing official place, he had successfully 
made against the threatened abrogation of the 
Charter of the Colony, which every class and 
colour of natives cherish and revere as a most 
precious, almost sacred, inheritance. The suc- 
cessful champion of their menaced liberties 
found clustering around him the grateful hearts 
of all his countrymen, who, in their hour of 
dread at the danger of their time-honoured 
constitution, had clung in despair to him as the 
only leader capable of heading the struggle and 
leading the people, by wise and constitutional 
guidance, to the victory which they desired but 
could not achieve for themselves. 

Sir William Robinson, who was sent out as 
pacificator, saw and took in at a glance the 
whole significance of the condition of affairs, 
especially in their relation to Mr. Reeves, and 
vice versa. With the unrivalled pre-eminence 
and predominant personal influence of the latter, 
the Colonial Office had possessed more than 
ample means of being perfectly familiar. What, 
then, could be more natural and consonant with 



i 4 2 FROUDACITY. 

sound policy than that the then acknowledged, 
but officially unattached, head of the people 
(being an eminent lawyer), should, on the 
occurrence of a vacancy in the highest juridical 
post, be appointed to co-operate with the 
supreme head of the Executive ? Mr. Reeves 
was already the chief of the legal body of the 
Colony ; his appointment, therefore, as Chief 
Justice amounted to nothing more than an 
official ratification of an accomplished and 
unalterable fact. Of course, it was no fault of 
England's that the eminent culture, political 
influence, and unapproached legal status of Mr. 
Reeves should have coincided exactly with her 
political requirements at that crisis, nor yet that 
she should have utilized a coincidence which 
had the double advantage of securing the perma- 
nent services, whilst realizing at the same time 
the life's aspiration, of a distinguished British 
subject. But that Mr. Froude should be din- 
ning in our ears this case of benefited self- 
interest, gaining the amplest reciprocity, both 
as to service and serviceableness, with the 
disinterested spontaneity of America's eleva- 
tion of Mr. Douglass, is but another proof of 
the obliquity of the moral medium through 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION, 143 

which he is wont to survey mankind and their 
concerns. 

The distinction between the two marvellous 
careers which we have been discussing de- 
mands, as it is susceptible of, still sharper 
accentuation. In the final success of Reeves, 
it is the man himself who confronts one in the 
unique transcendency and victoriousness of 
personal merit. On the other hand, a million 
times the personal merit of Reeves combined 
with his own could have availed Douglass 
absolutely nothing in the United States, legal 
and social proscript that he was, with public 
opinion generally on the side of the laws and 
usages against him. The very little countries 
of the world are proverbial for the production 
of very great men. But, on the other hand, 
narrowness of space favours the concentra- 
tion and coherence of the adverse forces that 
might impede, if they fail of utterly thwart- 
ing, the success which may happen to be 
grudged by those possessing the will and the 
power for its obstruction. In Barbados, so far 
as we have heard, read, and seen ourselves of 
the social ins and outs of that little sister- 
colony, the operation of the above mentioned 



144 FROUDACITY. 

influences has been, may still be, to a cer- 
tain extent, distinctly appreciable. Although 
in English jurisprudence there is no law 
ordaining the proscription, on the ground 
of race or colour, of any eligible candidate 
for social or political advancement, yet is it 
notorious that the ethics and practices of the 
" Anglo- West Indians" — who, our author 
has dared to say, represent the higher type 
of Englishmen — have, throughout successive 
generations, effectually and of course detri- 
mentally operated, as though by a positive 
Medo- Persian edict, in a proscriptive sense. It 
therefore demanded extraordinary toughness 
of constitutional fibre, moral, mental, and, let 
us add, physical too, to overcome the obstacles 
opposed to the progress of merit, too often 
by persons in intelligence below contempt, 
but, in prosperity and accepted pretension, 
formidable indeed to fight against and over- 
come. We shudder to think of the petty 
cabals, the underbred indignities, direct and 
indirect, which the present eminent Judge 
had to watch against, to brush aside, to smile 
at, in course of his epic strides towards the 
highest local pinnacle of his profession. But 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 145 

with him, as Time has shown, it was all sure 
and safe. 

Providence had endowed him with the 
powers and temperament that break down, 
when opportunity offers, every barrier to the 
progress of the gifted and strong and brave. 
That opportunity, in his particular case, offered 
itself in the Confederation crisis. Distracted 
and helpless "Anglo- West Indians" thronged 
to him in imploring crowds, praying that their 
beloved Charter should be saved by the exer- 
tion of his incomparable abilities. Save and 
except Dr. Carrington, there was not a single 
member of the dominant section in Barbados 
whom it would not be absurd to name even as 
a near second to him whom all hailed as the 
Champion of their Liberties. In the contest 
to be waged the victory was not, as it never 
once has been, reserved to the Skin or pedi- 
gree of the combatants. The above two 
matters, which in the eyes of the ruling "Bims" 
had, throughout long decades of undisturbed 
security, been placed before and above all pos- 
sible considerations, gravitated down to their in- 
herent insignificance when Intellect and Worth 
were destined to fight out the issue. Mr. 

10 



i.46 FROUDACITY. 

Reeves, whose possession of the essential 
qualifications was admittedly greater than that 
of every colleague, stood, therefore, in unques- 
tioned supremacy, lord of the political situation, 
with the result above stated. 

To what we have already pointed out re- 
garding the absolute impossibility of such an 
opportunity ever presenting itself in America 
to Mr. Douglass, in a political sense, we may 
now add that, whereas, in Barbados, for the 
intellectual equipment needed at the crisis, Mr. 
Reeves stood quite alone, there could, in the 
bosom of the Union, even in respect of the 
gifts in which Mr. Douglass was most brilliant, 
be no " walking over the course " by him. It 
was in the country and time of Bancroft, Irving, 
Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, Bryant, Motley, 
Henry Clay, Dan Webster, and others of the 
laureled phalanx which has added so great and 
imperishable a lustre to the literature of the 
English tongue. 

We proceed here another step, and take up 
a fresh deliverance of our author's in reference 
to the granting of the franchise to the black 
population of these Colonies. "It is," says Mr. 
James Anthony Froude, who is just as pro- 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. i 47 

phetic as his prototypes, the slave-owners of 
the last half-century, ' c it is as certain as any- 
thing future can be, that if we give the negroes 
as a body the political privileges which we claim 
for ourselves, they they will use them only to 
their own injury." The forepart of the above 
citation reads very much as if its author wrote 
it on the principle of raising a ghost for the 
mere purpose of laying it. What visionary, 
what dreamer of impossible dreams, has ever 
asked for the Negroes as a body the same 
political privileges which are claimed for them- 
selves by Mr. Froude and others of his 
countrymen, who are presumably capable of 
exercising them ? No one in the West Indies 
has ever done so silly a thing as to ask for 
the Negroes as a body that which has not, as 
everybody knows, and never will be, conceded 
to the people of Great Britain as a body. The 
demand for Reform in the Crown Colonies — a 
demand which our author deliberately mis- 
represents — is made neither by nor for the 
Negro, Mulatto, White, Chinese, nor East 
Indian. It is a petition put forward by promi- 
nent responsible colonists — the majority of 
whom are Whites, and mostly Britons besides. 



i 4 8 FROUDACITY. 

Their prayer, in which the whole population 
in these Colonies most heartily join, is simply 
and most reasonably that we, the said Colonies, 
being an integral portion of the British Empire, 
and having, in intelligence and every form of 
civilized progress, outgrown the stage of politi- 
cal tutelage, should be accorded some measure 
of emancipation therefrom. And thereby we — 
White, Black, Mulatto, and all other inhabitants 
and tax-payers — shall be able to protect our- 
selves against the self-seeking and bold in- 
difference to our interests which seem to be 
the most cherished expression of our rulers' 
official existence. It may be possible (for he 
has attempted it), that our new instructor in 
Colonial ethics and politics, under the impulsion 
of skin-superiority, and also of confidence in the 
probable success of experiments successfully 
tried fifty years before, does really believe in 
the sensibleness of separating colours, and 
representing the wearers of them as being 
generally antagonistic to one another in Her 
Majesty's West Indian Dominions. How is it 
then, we may be permitted to ask Mr. Froude, 
that no complaint of the sort formulated by 
him as against the Blacks has ever been put 



SOCIAL^ RE VOL UTION. 149 

forward by the thousands of Englishmen, 
Scotchmen, Irishmen, and other Europeans 
who are permanent inhabitants, proprietors, 
and tax-payers of these Colonies ? The reason 
is that Anglo- West Indianism, or rather 
Colonialism, is the creed of a few residents 
sharply divisible into two classes in the West 
Indies. Labouring conjointly under race- 
madness, the first believes that, as being of 
the Anglo-Saxon race, they have a right to 
crow and dominate in whatever land they 
chance to find themselves, though in their own 
country they or their forefathers had had to be 
very dumb dogs indeed. The Colonial Office 
has for a long time been responsible for the 
presence in superior posts of highly salaried 
gentry of this category, who have delighted in 
showing themselves off as the unquestionable 
masters of those who supply them with the 
pay that gives them the livelihood and position 
they so ungratefully requite. These fortunate 
folk, Mr. Froude avers, are likely to leave our 
shores in a huff, bearing off with them the civil- 
izing influences which their presence so surely 
guarantees. Go tell to the marines that the 
seed of Israel flourishing in the borders of 



15© FR0UDAC1TY. 

Misraim will abandon their flourishing district 
of Goshen through sensitiveness on account of 
the idolatry of the devotees of I sis and Osiris ! 
The second and less placable class of 
" Englishmen in the West Indies," whose final 
departure our author would have us to believe 
would complete the catastrophe to progress in 
the British Antilles, is very impalpable indeed. 
We cannot feel them. We have failed to 
even see them. True, Mr. Froude scouts on 
their behalf the bare notion of their con- 
descending to meet, on anything like equality, 
us, whom he and they pretend (rather ana- 
chronistically, at least) to have been their 
former slaves, or servants. But where, in the 
name of Heaven, where are these sortis de la 
cuisse de Jupiter, Mr. Froude ? If they are 
invisible, mourning in impenetrable seclusion 
over the impossibility of having, as their fathers 
had before them, the luxury of living at the 
Negroes' expense, shall we Negroes who are in 
the sunshine of heaven, prepared to work and 
win our way, be anywise troubled in our Jubilee 
by the drivelling ineptitude which insanely re- 
minds us of the miseries of those who went 
before us ? We have thus arrived at the car 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 151 

dinal, essential misrepresentation, out of scores 
which compose " The Bow of Ulysses," and 
upon which its phrases mainly hinge. Semper 
eadem — " Always the same " — has been the 
proud motto of the mightiest hierarchy that has 
controlled human action and shaped the destinies 
of mankind, no less in material than in ghostly 
concerns. Yet is a vast and very beneficial 
change, due to the imperious spirit of the times, 
manifest in the Roman Church, No longer do 
■the stake, the sword, and the dismal horrors of 
the interdict figure as instruments for assuring 
conformity and submission to her dogmas. 
She is now content to rest her claims on her 
beneficence in the past, as attested by noble 
and imperishable memorials of her solicitude 
for the poor and the ignorant, and in proclaim- 
ing the gospel without those ghastly coercives 
to its acceptance. Surely such a change, how- 
ever unpalatable to those who have been com- 
pelled to make it, is most welcome to the 
outside world at large. "Always the same" is 
also, or should be, the device of the discredited 
herd whose spokesman Mr. Froude is so proud 
to be. In nothing has their historical character, 
as shown in the published literature of their 



152 FROUDACITY. 

cause up to 1838, exhibited any sign of amelio- 
ration. It cannot be affected by the spirit and 
the lessons of the times. Mendacity and a sort 
of judicial blindness seem to be the two most 
salient characteristics by which are to be dis- 
tinguished these implacable foes and would- 
be robbers of human rights and liberty. But, 
gracious heavens ! what can tempt mortals to 
incur this weight of infamy ? Wealth and 
Power ? To be (very improbably) a Crcesus 
or (still more improbably) a Bonaparte, and to 
perish at the conventional age, and of vulgar 
disease, like both ? Turpitudes on the part of 
sane men, involving the sacrifice of the price- 
less attributes of humanity, can be rendered 
intelligible by the supreme temporal gains 
above indicated, but only if exemption from the 
common lot of mankind — in the shape of care, 
disease, and death — were accompaniments of 
those prizes. 

In favour of slavery, which has for so many 
centuries desolated the African family and 
blighted its every chance of indigenous pro- 
gress — of slavery whose abolition our author 
so ostentatiously regrets — only one solitary 
permanent result, extending in every case over 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 153 

a natural human life, has been paraded by him 
as a respectable justification. At page 246, 
speaking of Negroes met by him during a 
stroll which he took at Mandeville, Jamaica, he 
tells us : — 

" The people had black faces ; but even they 
had shaped their manners in the old English 
models. The men touched their hats respect- 
fully (as they eminently did not in Kingston 
and its environs). The women smiled and 
curtsied, and the children looked shy when 
one spoke to them. The name of slavery is a 
horror to us ; but there must have been some- 
thing human and kindly about it, too, when it 
left upon the character the marks of courtesy 
and good breeding" ! 

Alas for Africa and the sufferings of her 
desolated millions, in view of so light-hearted 
an assessment as this ! Only think of the 
ages of outrage, misery, and slaughter — of the 
countless hecatombs that Mammon is hereby 
absolved from having directly exacted, since 
the sufficing expiatory outcome of it all has 
been only " marks of courtesy and good breed- 
ing " ! Marks that are displayed, forsooth, by 
the survivors of the ghastly experiences or by 



154 FROUDACITY. 

their descendants ! And yet, granting the ap- 
preciable ethical value of the hat-touching, the 
smirking and curtseyings of those Blacks to 
persons whom they had no reason to suspect 
of unfriendliness, or whose white face they 
may in the white man's country have greeted 
with a civility perhaps only prudential, we fail 
to discover the necessity of the dreadful agency 
we have adverted to, for securing the results 
on manners which are so warmly commended. 
African explorers, from Mungo Park to Living- 
stone and Stanley, have all borne sufficient 
testimony to the world regarding the natural 
friendliness of the Negro in his ancestral home, 
when not under the influence of suspicion, 
anger, or dread. 

It behoves us to repeat (for our detractor is a 
persistent repeater) that the cardinal dodge by 
which Mr. Froude and his few adherents expect 
to succeed in obtaining the reversal of the pro- 
gress of the coloured population is by misrepre- 
senting the elements, and their real attitude 
towards one another, of the sections composing 
the British West Indian communities. Every- 
body knows full well that Englishmen, Scotch- 
men, and Irishmen (who are not officials), as 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 155 

well as Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Portu- 
guese, and other nationalities, work in unbroken 
harmony and, more or less, prosper in these 
Islands. These are no cherishers of any vain 
hankering after a state of things in which men 
felt not the infamy of living not only on the 
unpaid labour, but at the expense of the suffer- 
ings, the blood, and even the life of their fellow- 
men. These men, honourable by instinct 
and of independent spirit, depend on their own 
resources for self-advancement in the world — 
on their capital either of money in their pockets 
or of serviceable brains in their heads, energy 
in their limbs, and on these alone, either singly 
or more or less in combination. These reput- 
able specimens of manhood have created homes 
dear to them in these favoured climes ; and 
they, at any rate, being on the very best terms 
with all sections of the community in which 
their lot is cast, have a common cause as 
fellow - sufferers under the rdgime of Mr. 
Froude's official " birds of passage." The 
agitation in Trinidad tells its own tale. There 
is not a single black man — though there should 
have been many — among the leaders of the 
movement for Reform. Nevertheless the honour- 



156 FROUDACITY. 

able and truthful author of " The English in the 
West Indies," in order to invent a plausible 
pretext for his sinister labours of love on behalf 
of the poor pro-slavery survivals, and despite 
his knowledge that sturdy Britons are at the 
head of the agitation, coolly tells the world that 
it is a struggle to secure " negro domination." 
The further allegation of our author respecting 
the black man is curious and, of course, dismally 
prophetic. As the reader may perhaps recol- 
lect, it is to the effect that granting political 
power to the Negroes as a body, equal in scope 
" to that claimed by Us " (i.e., Mr. Froude and 
his friends), would certainly result in the use of 
these powers by the Negroes to their own injury. 
And wherefore ? If Mr. Froude professes to 
believe — what is a fact — that there is " no 
original or congenital difference of capacity" 
between the white and the African races, where 
is the consistency of his urging a contention 
which implies inferiority in natural shrewdness, 
as regards their own affairs, on the part of black 
men ? Does this blower of the two extremes 
of temperature in the same breath pretend that 
the average British voter is better informed, 
can see more clearly what is for his own advan- 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 157 

tage, is better able to assess the relative merits 
of persons to be entrusted with the spending 
of his taxes, and the general management of 
his interests ? If Mr. Froude means all this, 
he is at issue not only with his own specific 
declaration to the contrary, but with facts of 
overwhelming weight and number showing pre- 
cisely the reverse. We have personally had 
frequent opportunities of coming into contact, 
both in and out of England, with natives of 
Great Britain, not of the agricultural order 
alone, but very often of the artisan class, whose 
ignorance of the commonest matters was as 
dense as it was discreditable to the land of their 
birth and breeding. Are these people included 
(on account of having his favourite sine qua non 
of a fair skin) in the us of this apostle of 
skin-worship, in the indefeasible right to poli- 
tical power which is denied to Blacks by reason, 
or rather non-reason, of their complexion ? 

f he fact is, that, judging by his own senti- 
ments and those of his Anglo- West Indian 
friends, Mr. Froude calculated on producing an 
impression in favour of their discreditable views 
by purposely keeping out of sight the numerous 
European and other sufferers under the yoke 



158 FROUDACITY. 

which he sneers at seeing described by its 
proper appellation of " a degrading tyranny." 
The prescriptive unfavourable forecast of our 
author respecting political power in the hands 
of the Blacks may, in our opinion, be hailed as 
a warrant for its bestowal by those in whose 
power that bestowal may be. As a pro-slavery 
prophecy, equally dismal and equally confident 
with the hundreds that preceded it, this new 
vaticination may safely be left to be practically 
dealt with by the Race, victimized and maligned, 
whose real genius and character are purposely 
belied by those who expect to be gainers by 
the process. Invested with political power, the 
Negroes, Mr. Froude goes on to assure his 
readers, " will slide back into their old con- 
dition, and the chance will be gone of lifting 
them to the level to which, we have no right to 
say they are incapable of rising." How touch- 
ingly sympathetic ! How transcendently liberal 
and righteous ! But, to speak the truth, is not 
this solicitude of our cynical defamer on our 
behalf, after all, a useless waste of emotion on 
his part ? Timeo Danaos et dona fei'entes. 
The tears of the crocodile are most copious in 
close view of the banquet on his prey. This 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 159 

reiterated twaddle of Mr. Froude, in futile and 
unseasonable echo of the congenial predictions 
of his predecessors in the same line, might be 
left to receive not only the answer of his own 
book to the selfsame talk of the slavers fifty 
years ago, but also that of the accumulated 
refutations which America has furnished for 
the last twenty-five years as to the retrograde 
tendency so falsely imputed. But, taking it as 
a serious contention, we find that it involves a 
suggestion that the according of electoral votes 
to citizens of a certain complexion would, per 
se and ipso facto, produce a revulsion and 
collapse of the entire prevailing organization 
and order of a civilized community. 

What talismanic virtue this prophet of evil 
attributes to a vote in the hand of a Negro out 
of Barbados, where for years the black man's 
vote has been operating, harmlessly enough, 
Heaven knows, we cannot imagine. At all 
events, as sliding back on the part of a com- 
munity is a matter which would require some 
appreciable time, however brief, let us hope 
that the authorities charged " to see that the 
state receive no detriment" would be vigilant 
enough and in time to arrest the evil and vindi- 



i6o FROUDACITY. 

cate the efficiency of the civilized methods of 
self-preservation. 

Our author concludes by another reference 
to Chief Justice Reeves : " Let British autho- 
rity die away, and the average black nature, 
such as it now is, be left free to assert 
itself, there will be no more negroes like him 
in Barbadoes or anywhere!' How the dying 
away of British authority in a British Colony is 
to come to pass, Mr. Froude does not con- 
descend here explicitly to state. But we are 
left free to infer from the whole drift of " The 
English in the West Indies" that it will come 
through the exodus en masse said to be threatened 
by his " Anglo-West Indians." Mr. Froude 
sympathetically justifies the disgust and exas- 
peration of these reputable folk at the presence 
and progress of the race for whose freedom and 
ultimate elevation Britain was so lavish of the 
wealth of her noblest intellects, besides paying 
the prodigious money-ransom of twenty million 
pounds sterling. With regard to our author's 
talk about " the average black nature, such as it 
now exists, being left free to assert itself," and 
the dire consequences therefrom to result, we 
can only feel pity at the desperate straits to 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 161 

which, in his search for a pretext for gratuitous 
slander, a man of our author's capacity has been 
so ignominiously reduced. All we can say to 
him with reference to this portion of his violent 
suppositions is that " the average black nature, 
such as it now exists," should not, in a civilized 
community, be left free to assert itself, any more 
than the average white, the average brown, the 
average red, or indeed any average colour of 
human nature whatsoever. As self-defence is 
the first law of nature, it has followed that 
every condition of organized society, however 
simple or primitive, is furnished with some recog- 
nized means of self-protection against the free 
assertion of itself by the average nature of any 
of its members. 

Of course, if things should ever turn out 
according to Mr. Froude's desperate hypo- 
thesis, it may also happen that there will be 
no more Negroes like Mr. Justice Reeves in 
Barbados. But the addition of the words "or 
anywhere" to the above statement is just 
another of those suppressions of the truth 
which, absolutely futile though they are, con- 
stitute the only means by which the policy he 
writes to promote can possibly be made to 

ii 



i62 FROUDACITY. 

appear even tolerable. The assertion of our 
author, therefore, standing as it actually does, 
embracing the whole world, is nothing less 
than an audacious absurdity, for there stand 
the United States, the French and Spanish 
Islands — not to speak of the Central and South 
American Republics, Mexico, and Brazil— all 
thronged with black, mixed blood, and even 
half-breed high officials, staring him and the 
whole world in the face. 

The above noted suppression of the truth to 
the detriment of the obnoxious population re- 
calls a passage wherein the suggestion of what 
is not the truth has been resorted to for the 
same purpose. At page 123 we read: "The 
disproportion of the two races — always danger- 
ously large — has increased with ever-gathering 
velocity since the emancipation. It is now 
beyond control on the old lines" The use of 
the expletive " dangerously," as suggestive of 
the truculence of the people to whom it refers, 
is critically allowable in view of the main inten- 
tion of the author. But what shall we say of the 
suggestion contained in the very next sentence, 
which we have italicized ? We are required 
by it to understand that in slavery-time the 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 163 

planters had some organized method, rendered 
impracticable by the Emancipation, of check- 
ing, for their own personal safety, the growth 
of the coloured population. If we, in deference 
to the superior mental capacity of our author, 
admit that self-interest was no irresistible motive 
for promoting the growth of the human " pro- 
perty " on which their prosperity depended, we 
are yet at liberty to ask what was the nature 
of the " old lines " followed for controlling the 
increase under discussion. Was it suffocation 
of the babes by means of sulphur fumes, the 
use of beetle-paste, or exposure on the banks 
of the Caribbean rivers ? In the later case 
History evidently lost a chance of self-repetition 
in the person of some leader like Moses, the 
Hebra- Egyptian Spartacus, arising to avenge 
and deliver his people. 

We now shall note how he proceeds to descant 
on slavery itself: — " Slavery," says he, "was a 
survival from a social order which had passed 
away, and slavery could not be continued. It 

DOES NOT FOLLOW THAT per Se IT WAS A CRIME. 

The negroes who were sold to the dealers in 
the factories were most of them either slaves 
already to worse masters or were servi, ser- 



1 64 FROUDACITY. 

vants in the old meaning of the word, or else 
criminals, servati or reserved from death. They 
would otherwise have been killed, and since the 
slave trade has been abolished, are again killed 
in the too celebrated customs. ..." 

Slavery, as Mr. Froude and the rest of us are 
bound to discuss it at present, is by no means 
susceptible of the gloss which he has endea- 
voured, in the above extract, to put on it. 
The British nation, in 1834, had to confront 
and deal with the only species of slavery which 
was then within the cognizance of public morals 
and practical politics. Doubtless our author, 
learned and erudite as he is, would like to 
transport us to those patriarchal ages when, 
under theocratic decrees, the chosen people 
were authorized to purchase (not to kidnap) 
slaves, and keep them as an everlasting inherit- 
ance in their posterity. The slaves so purchased, 
we know, became members of the families to 
which their lot was attached, and were hedged 
in from cruel usage by distinct and salutary 
regulations. This is the only species of slavery 
which — with the addition of the old Germanic 
self-enslavements and the generally prevailing 
ancient custom of pledging one's personal ser- 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 165 

vices in liquidation of indebtedness — can be 
covered by the singular verdict of non- 
criminality which our author has pronounced. 
He, of course, knows much better than 
we do what the condition of slaves was 
in Greece as well as in Rome. He knows, 
too, that the " wild and guilty phantasy 
that man could hold property in man," lost 
nothing of its guilt or its wildness with the 
lapse of time and the changes of circumstances 
which overtook and affected those reciprocal 
relations. Every possibility of deterioration, 
every circumstance wherein man's fallen nature 
could revel in its worst inspirations, reached 
culmination at the period when the interference 
of the world, decreed by Providence, was ren- 
dered imperative by the sufferings of the bonds- 
men. It is this crisis of the history of human 
enslavement that Mr. Froude must talk about, 
if he wishes to talk to any purpose on the 
subject at all. His scoffs at British "-virtuous 
benevolence," and his imputation of ingratitude 
to the Negro in respect of that self-same 
benevolence, do not refer to any theocratic, 
self-contracted, abstract, or idyllic condition 
of servitude. They pin his meaning down 



1 66 FROUDACITY. 

to that particular phase when slavery had 
become not only " the sum," but the very 
quintessence, " of all human villainies." 

At its then phase, slavery had culminated 
into being a menace, portentous and far- 
encroaching, to not only the moral life but 
the very civilization of the higher types of 
the human family, so debasing and blighting 
were its effects on those who came into even 
tolerating contact with its details. The in- 
describable atrocities practised on the slaves, 
the deplorable sapping of even respectable 
principles in owners of both sexes — all these 
stood forth in their ineffable hideousness before 
the uncorrupted gaze of the moral heroes, sons 
of Britain and America, and also of other 
countries, who, buckling on the armour of 
civilization and right, fought for the vindi- 
cation of them both, through every stern 
vicissitude, and won the first grand, ever- 
memorable victory of 1838, whereof we so 
recently celebrated the welcome Jubilee ! Oh ! 
it was a combat of archangels against the 
legions that Mammon had banded together 
and incited to the conflict. But though it was 
Sharp, Clarkson, Wilberforce, and the rest 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 167 

of that illustrious host of cultured, lofty- souled, 
just, merciful, and beneficent men, who were 
thus the saviours, as well as the servants, of 
society, yet have we seen it possible for an 
Englishman of to-day to mouth against their 
memory the ineptitudes of their long-van- 
quished foes, and to flout the consecrated 
dead in their graves, as the Boeotian did the 
living Pericles in the market-place of Athens ! 

Why waste words and time on this defamer 
of his own countrymen, who, on account of the 
material gain and the questionable martial 
glory of the conquest, eulogizes Warren Has- 
tings, the viceregal plunderer of India, whilst, 
in the same breath, he denounces Edmund 
Burke for upholding the immutable principles 
of right and justice ! These principles once, 
and indubitably now, so precious in their fullest 
integrity to the normal British conscience, 
must henceforth, say Mr. Froude and his 
fellow-colonialists, be scored off the moral code 
of Britain, since they " do not pay " in tangible 
pelf, in self-aggrandisement, or in dazzling 
prestige. 

The statement that many negroes who were 
sold to the dealers in the factories were " slaves 



168 FROUDACITY. 

already to worse masters " is, in the face of 
facts which could not possibly have been un- 
known to him, a piece of very daring assertion. 
But this should excite no wonder, considering 
that precise and scrupulous accuracy would 
be fatal to the discreditable cause to which he 
so shamelessly proclaims his adhesion. As 
being familiar since early childhood with mem- 
bers of almost every tribe of Africans (mainly 
from or arriving by way of the West Coast) 
who were brought to our West Indies, we are 
in a position to contradict the above assertion 
of Mr. Froude's, its unfaltering confidence not- 
withstanding. We have had the Madingoes, 
Foulahs, Houssas, Calvers, Gallahs, Karamen- 
ties, Yorubas, Aradas, Cangas, Kroos, Timnehs, 
Veis, Eboes, Mokoes, Bibis, and Congoes, as 
the most numerous and important of the tribal 
contribution of Africa to the population of these 
Colonies. Now, from what we have intimately 
learned of these people (excepting the Congoes, 
who always appeared to us an inferior tribe 
to all the others), we unhesitatingly deny that 
even three in ten of the whole number were 
ever slaves in their own country, in the sense 
of having been born under any organized 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 169 

system of servitude. The authentic records 
relating to the enslavement of Africans, as a 
regular systematized traffic, do not date further 
back than five centuries ago. It is true that 
a great portion of ancient literature and many 
monuments bear distinct evidence, all the more 
impressive because frequently only casual, that, 
from the earliest ages, the Africans had shared, 
in common with other less civilized peoples, 
the doom of having to furnish the menial 
and servile contingents of the more favoured 
sections of the human family. Now, dating 
from, say, five hundred years ago, which was 
long indeed after the disappearance of the old 
leading empires of the world, we have (save 
and except in the case of Arab incursionists 
into the Eastern and Northern coasts) no re- 
liable authority for saying, or even for sup- 
posing, that the tribes of the African interior 
suffered from the molestations of professional 
man-hunters. 

It was the organization of the West Coast 
slave traffic towards the close of the sixteenth 
century, and the extermination of the Carib- 
bean aborigines by Spain, soon after Columbus 
had discovered the Western Continent, which 



170 FEOUDACITY. 

gave cohesion, system, impetus, and aggressive- 
ness to the trade in African flesh and blood. 
Then the factory dealers did not wait at their 
seaboard mart, as our author would have us 
suppose, for the human merchandize to be 
brought down to them. The auri sacra fames, 
the accursed craving for gain, was too im- 
perious for that. From the Atlantic border to 
as far inland as their emissaries could penetrate, 
their bribes, in every species of exchangeable 
commodities, were scattered among the ra- 
pacious chiefs on the river banks ; while these 
latter, incited as well by native ferocity as by 
lust of gain, rushed forth to "make war" on 
their neighbours, and to kidnap, for sale to the 
white purchaser, every man, woman, and child 
they could capture amidst the nocturnal flames, 
confusion, tumult, and terror resulting from 
their unexpected irruption. That the poor 
people thus captured and sold into foreign 
bondage were under worse masters than those 
under whom they, on being actually bought 
and becoming slaves, were doomed to ex- 
perience all the atrocities that have thrilled 
with horror the conscience of the civilized 
Christian world, is a statement of worse than 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 171 

childish absurdity. Every one, except Mr. 
Froude and his fellow-apologists for slavery, 
knows that the cruelty of savage potentates is 
summary, uncalculating, and, therefore, merciful 
in its ebullitions. A head whisked off, brains 
dashed out, or some other short form of savage 
dispatch, is the preferential method of destruc- 
tion. With our author's better masters, there 
was the long, dreary vicissitude, beginning from 
the horrors of the capture, and ending perhaps 
years upon years after, in some bush or under 
the lash of the driver. The intermediate 
stages of the starvation life of hunger, chains, 
and hideous exposure at the barancoon, the 
stowing away like herrings on board the 
noisome ship, the suffocation, the deck-sores 
wrought into the body by the attrition of the 
bonier parts of the system against the unyield- 
ing wood — all these, says Mr. Froude, were 
more tolerable than the swift doing away with 
life under an African master ! Under such, 
at all events, the care and comfort suitable to 
age were strictly provided for, and cheered the 
advanced years of the faithful bondsman. 

After a good deal of talk, having the same 
logical value, our author, in his enthusiasm for 



1 72 FROUDACITY. 

slavery, delivers himself thus : " For myself, 
I would rather be the slave of a Shakespeare 
or a Burghley, than the slave of a majority in the 
House of Commons, or the slave of my own 
folly." Of the four above specified alternatives 
of enslavement, it is to be regretted that tem- 
perament, or what is more likely, perhaps, self- 
interest, has driven him to accept the fourth, 
or the latter of the two deprecated yokes, his 
book being an irrefutable testimony to the fact. 
For, most assuredly, it has not been at the 
prompting of wisdom that a learned man of 
unquestionably brilliant talents and some 
measure of accorded fame could have prosti- 
tuted those talents and tarnished that fame 
by condescending to be the literary spokesman 
of the set for whose miserable benefit he 
recommends the statesmen of his country to 
perjure and compromise themselves, regardless 
of inevitable consequences, which the value of 
the sectional satisfaction to be thereby given 
would but very poorly compensate. Possibly 
a House of Commons majority, whom this 
dermatophilist evidently rates far lower than 
his " Anglo -West Indians," might, if he were 
their slave, have protected their own self- 



SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 173 

respect by restraining him from vicariously 
scandalizing them by his effusions. 

After this curious boast about his prefer- 
ences as a hypothetic bondsman, Mr. Froude 
proceeds gravely to inform his readers that 
" there may be authority yet not slavery ; a 
soldier is not a slave, a wife is not a slave 
. . . " and he continues, with a view of 
utilizing these platitudes against the obnoxious 
Negro, by telling us that persons sustaining the 
above specified and similar relations " may not 
live by their own wills, or emancipate them- 
selves at their own pleasure from positions in 
which nature has placed them, or into which 
they have themselves voluntarily entered. The 
negroes of the West Indies are children, and 
not yet disobedient children. ... If you en- 
force self-government upon them when they 
are not asking for it, you may . . . wilfully 
drive them back into the condition of their 
ancestors, from which the slave-trade was the 
beginning of their emancipation " / The words 
which we have signalized by italics in the above 
extract could have been conceived only by 
a bigot — such an atrocious sentiment being 
possible only as the product of mind or morals 



174 FROUDACITY. 

wrenched hopelessly out of normal action. All 
the remainder of this hashing up of pointless 
commonplaces has for its double object a 
suggestio falsi against us Negroes as a body, 
and a diverting of attention, as we have proved 
before, from the numerous British claimants of 
Reform, whose personality Mr. Froude and his 
friends would keep out of view, provided their 
crafty policy has the result of effectually re- 
pressing the hitherto irrepressible, and, as such, 
to the " Anglo- West Indian," truly detestable 
Negro. 



West Indian CoNfEDEFjymo^. 



In heedless formulation of his reasons, if such 
they should be termed, for urging tooth and 
nail the non-according of reform to the Crown- 
governed Colonies, our author puts forth this 
dogmatic deliverance (p. 123) : — 

"A West Indian self-governing dominion is 
possible only with a full Negro vote. If the 
whites are to combine, so will the blacks. 
It will be a rule by the blacks and for the 
blacks." 

That a constitution for any of our diversely 
populated Colonies which may be fit for it is 
possible only with " a full Negro vote " (to the 
extent within the competence of such voting), 
goes without saying, as must be the case with 
every section of the Queen's subjects eligible 
for the franchise. The duly qualified Spaniard, 



•i76 FROUDACITY. 

Coolie, Portuguese, or man of any other non- 
British race, will each thus have a vote, the 
same as every Englishman or any other Briton. 
Why, then, should the vote of the Negro be 
so especially a bugbear ? It is because the 
Negro is the game which our political sports- 
man is in full chase of, and determined to hunt 
down at any cost. Granted, however, for the 
sake of argument, that black voters should pre- 
ponderate at any election, what then ? We are 
gravely told by this latter-day Balaam that " If 
the whites are to combine, so will the blacks," 
but he does not say for what purpose. 

His sentence, therefore, may be legitimately 
constructed in full for him in the only sense 
which is applicable to the mutual relations 
actually existing between those two directly 
specified sections of British subjects who he 
would fain have the world believe live in a 
state of active hostility : — " If the whites are 
to combine for the promotion of the general 
welfare, as many of the foremost of them have 
done before and are doing now, so will the 
blacks also combine in the support of such whites, 
and as staunch auxiliaries equally interested 
in the furtherance of the same ameliorative 



WEST INDIAN CONFEDERA TION 1 7 7 

objects." Except in the sense embodied in the 
foregoing sentence, we cannot, in these days, 
conceive with what intent persons of one 
section should so specially combine as to 
compel combination on the part of persons of 
any other. The further statement that a con- 
federation having a full black voting-power 
would be a government " by the blacks and for 
the blacks," is the logical converse of the now 
obsolete doctrine of Mr. Froude's inspirers — 
" a government by whites should be only for 
whites." But this formula, however strenuously 
insisted on by those who gave it shape, could 
never, since even before three decades from 
the first introduction of African slaves, be 
thoroughly put in practice, so completely had 
circumstances beyond man's devising or control 
compelled the altering of men's minds and 
methods with regard to the new interests 
which had irresistibly forced themselves into 
importance as vital items in political arrange- 
ments. Nowadays, therefore, that Mr. Froude 
should desire to create a state of feeling which 
had, and could have had, no existence with 
regard to the common interests of the inhabi- 
tants for upwards of two full centuries, is 

12 



178 FROUDACITY. 

evidently an excess of confidence which can only 
be truly described as amazing. But, after all, 
what does our author mean by the words " a 
government by the blacks " ? Are we to 
understand him as suggesting that voting by 
black electors would be synonymous with 
electing black representatives ? If so, he has 
clearly to learn much more than he has shown 
that he lacks, in order to understand and 
appreciate the vital influences at work in West 
Indian affairs. Undoubtedly, being the spokes- 
man of the few who (secretly) avow themselves 
to be particularly hostile to Ethiopians, he has 
done no more than reproduce their sentiments. 
For, conscious, as these hankerers after the old 
" institutions " are, of being utterly ineligible for 
the furthering of modern progressive ideas, they 
revenge themselves for their supersession on 
everybody and everything, save and except their 
own arrogant stolidity. White individuals who 
have part and lot in the various Colonies, with 
their hearts and feelings swayed by affections 
natural to their birth and earliest associations ; 
and Whites who have come to think the land 
of their adoption as dear to themselves as the 
land of their birth, entertain no such dread of 



WEST INDIAN CONFEDERATION. 179 

their fellow-citizens of any other section, whom 
they estimate according to intelligence and 
probity, and not according to any accident of 
exterior physique. Every intelligent black is 
as shrewd regarding his own interests as our 
author himself would be regarding his in the 
following hypothetical case : Some fine day, 
being a youth and a bachelor, he gets wedded, 
sets up an establishment, and becomes the 
owner of a clipper yacht. For his own service 
in the above circumstances we give him the 
credit to believe that, on the persons specified 
below applying among others to him for em- 
ployment, as chamber-maid and house-servant, 
and \ also as hands for the vessel, he would, in 
preference to any ordinarily recommended white 
applicants, at once engage the two black servant- 
girls at President Churchill's in Dominica, the 
droghermen there as able seamen, and as cabin- 
boy the lad amongst them whose precocious 
marine skill he has so warmly and justly ex- 
tolled. It is not because all these persons are 
black, but because of the soul-consciousness of 
the selector, that they each (were they even 
blue) had a title to preferential consideration, 
his experience and sense of fitness being 



i8o FROUDACITY. 

their most effectual supporters. Similarly, the 
Negro voter would elect representatives whom 
he knew he could trust for competency in the 
management of his affairs, and not persons 
whose sole recommendation to him would be 
the possession of the same kind of skin. Nor, 
from what we know of matters in the West 
Indies, do we believe that any white man of 
the class we have eulogized would hesitate 
to give his warmest suffrage to any black 
candidate who he knew would be a fitting 
representative of his interests. We could give 
examples from almost every West Indian 
island of white and coloured men who would be 
indiscriminately chosen as their candidate by 
either section. But the enumeration is needless, 
as the fact of the existence of such men is too 
notorious to require proof. 

Mr. Froude states plainly enough (p. 123) 
that, whereas a whole thousand years were 
needed to train and discipline the Anglo-Saxon 
race, yet " European government, European 
instruction, continued steadily till his natural 
tendencies are superseded by a higher instinct, 
may shorten the probation period of the negro." 
Let it be supposed that this period of probation 



WEST INDIAN CONFEDERA TION 1 8 1 

for the Negro should extend, under such excep- 
tionally favourable circumstances, to any period 
less than that which is alleged to have been 
needed by the Anglo-Saxon to attain his poli- 
tical manhood — what then are the prospects 
held out by Mr. Froude to us and our posterity 
on our mastering the training and discipline 
which he specially recommends for Blacks ? 
Our author, in view, doubtless, of the rapidity 
of our onward progress, and indeed our actual 
advancement in every respect, thus answers 
(pp. 123-4) : — " Let a generation or two pass 
by and carry away with them the old traditions, 
and an English governor-general will be found 
presiding over a black council, delivering the 
speeches made for him by a black prime 
minister ; and how long could this endure ? No 
English gentleman would consent to occupy so 
absurd a situation." 

And again, more emphatically, on the same 
point (p. 285): — "No Englishman, not even 
a bankrupt peer, would consent to occupy such 
a position ; the blacks themselves would despise 
him if he did ; and if the governor is to be one 
of their own race and colour, how long would 
such a connection endure ? " 



i82 FROUDACITY. 

It is plainly to be seen from the above two 
extracts that the political ethics of our author, 
being based on race and colour exclusively, 
would admit of no conceivable chance of real 
elevation to any descendant of Africa, who, 
being Ethiopian, could not possibly change his 
skin. The " old traditions " which Mr. Froude 
supposes to be carried away by his hypothetical 
(white) generations who have " passed by," 
we readily infer from his language, rendered 
impossible such incarnations of political ab- 
surdity as those he depicts. But what should 
be thought of the sense, if not indeed the 
sanity, of a grave political teacher who pre- 
scribes " European government" and " European 
education" as the specifics to qualify the Negro 
for political emancipation, and who, when these 
qualifications are conspicuously mastered by 
the Negro who has undergone the train- 
ing, refuses him the prize, because he is a 
Negro ? We see further that, in spite of 
being fit for election to council, and even to be 
prime ministers competent to indite governors' 
messages, the pigment under our epidermis 
dooms us to eventual disappointment and a 
life-long condition of contempt. Even so is it 



WEST INDIAN CONFEDERA TION 1 83 

desired by Mr. Froude and his clients, and not 
without a spice of piquancy is their opinion 
that for a white ruler to preside and rule over 
and accept the best assistance of coloured men, 
qualified as above stated, would be a self- 
degradation too unspeakable for toleration by 
any Englishman — "even a bankrupt peer." 
Unfortunately for Mr. Froude, we can point him 
to page 56 of this his very book, where, speak- 
ing of Grenada and deprecating the notion of 
its official abandonment, our author says : — 

" Otherwise they [Negroes] were quiet fellows, 
and if the politicians would only let them alone, 
the})' would be perfectly contented, and might 
eventually, if wisely managed, come to some 
good. . . . Black the island was, and black it 
would remain. The conditions were never likely 
to arise which would bring back a European 
population ; but a governor who was a sensible 
man, who would reside and use his natural 
influence, could manage it with perfect ease." 

Here, then, we see that the governor of an 
entirely black population may be a sensible 
man, and yet hold the post. Our author, in- 
deed, gives the Blacks over whom this sensible 
governor would hold rule as being in number 



■i84 FROUDACITY. 

just 40,000 souls ; and we are therefore bound 
to accept the implied suggestion that the dis- 
honour of holding supremacy over persons of 
the odious colour begins just as their number 
begins to count onward from 40,000! There 
is quite enough in the above verbal vagaries of 
our philosopher to provoke a volume of com-, 
ment. But we must pass on to further clauses of 
this precious paragraph. Mr. Froude's talent 
for eating his own words never had a more 
striking illustration than here, in his denial of 
the utility of native experience as the safest 
guide a governor could have in the administra- 
tion of Colonial affairs. At page 9 1 he says : — 
" Among the public servants of Great Britain 
there are persons always to be found fit and 
willing for posts of honour and ' difficulty y if a 
sincere effort be made to find them." 

A post of honour and difficulty, we and all 
other persons in the British dominions had all 
along understood was regarded as such in the 
case of functionaries called upon to contend 
with adverse forces in the accomplishment 
of great ends conceived by their superiors. 
But we find that, according to Mr. Froude, all 
the credit that has hitherto redounded to those 



WEST INDIAN CONFEDERATION. 185 

who had succeeded in such tasks has been 
in reality nothing more than a gilding over 
of disgrace, whenever the exertions of such 
officials had been put forth amongst persons 
not wearing a European epidermis. The ex- 
tension of British influence and dominion over 
regions inhabited by races not white is there- 
fore, on the part of those who promote it, a 
perverse opening of arenas for the humiliation 
and disgrace of British gentlemen, nay, even of 
those titled members of the " black sheep" 
family — bankrupt peers ! As we have seen, 
however, ample contradiction and refutation 
have been considerately furnished by the same 
objector in this same volume, as in his praises 
of the governor just quoted. 

The cavil of Mr. Froude about English 
gentlemen reading messages penned by black 
prime ministers applies with double force to 
English barristers (who axe gentlemen by statute) 
receiving the law from the lips of black judges. 
For all that, however, an emergency arose 
so pressing as to compel even the colonialism 
of Barbados to practically and completely refute 
this doctrine, by praying for, and submitting 
with gratitude to, the supreme headship of a 



i86 FROUDACITY. 

man of the race which our author so finically 
depreciates. In addition it may be observed 
that for a governor to even consult his prime 
minister in the matter of preparing his mes- 
sages might conceivably be optional, whilst it is 
obligatory on all barristers, whether English or 
otherwise, to defer to the judge's interpretation 
of the law in every case — appeal afterwards 
being the only remedy. As to the dictum that 
"the two races are not equal and will not 
blend," it is open to the fatal objection that, 
having himself proved, with sympathizing 
pathos, how the West Indies are now well-nigh 
denuded of their Anglo-Saxon inhabitants, Mr. 
Froude would have us also understand that the 
miserable remnant who still complainingly in- 
habit those islands must, by doing violence to 
the understanding, be taken as the whole of the 
world-pervading Anglo-Saxon family. The 
Negroes of the West Indies number a good 
deal more than two million souls. Does this 
suggester of extravagances mean that the 
prejudices and vain conceit of the few dozens 
whom he champions should be made to over- 
ride and overbear, in political arrangements, 
the serious and solid interests of so many 



WES T INDIAN CONFEDERA TION i 8 7 

hundreds of thousands ? That " the two races 
are not equal " is a statement which no sane 
man would dispute, but acquiescence in its 
truth involves also a distinct understanding that 
the word race, as applied in the present case by 
our author, is a simple accommodation of terms 
— a fashion of speech having a very restricted 
meaning in this serious discussion. 

The Anglo-Saxon race pervades Great 
Britain, its cradle, and the Greater Britain ex- 
tending almost all over the face of the earth, 
which is the arena of its activities and marvel- 
lous achievements. To tell us, therefore, as Mr. 
Froude does, that the handful of malcontents 
whose unrespectable grievance he holds up 
to public sympathy represents the Anglo- 
Saxon race, is a grotesque fafon de parler. 
Taking our author's "Anglo- West Indians" and 
the people of Ethiopian descent respectively, 
it would not be too much to assert, nor in any- 
wise difficult to prove by facts and figures, that 
for every competent individual of the former 
section in active civilized employments, the 
coloured section can put forward at least 
twenty thoroughly competent rivals. Yet are 
these latter the people whom the classic Mr. 



188 FROUDACITY. 

Froude wishes to be immolated, root and 
branch, in all their highest and dearest interests, 
in order to secure the maintenance of " old tra- 
ditions " which, he tells us, guaranteed for the 
dominant cuticle the sacrifice of the happiness 
of down-trodden thousands ! Referring to his 
hypothetical confederation with its black office- 
holders, our author scornfully asks : — 
1 'And how long would this endure ? " 
The answer must be that, granting the exist- 
ence of such a state of things, its duration 
would be not more nor less than under white 
functionaries. For according to himself (p. 1 24) : 
" There is no original or congenital difference 
of capacity between " the white and black races, 
and " with the same chances and the same 
treatment, . . . distinguished men would be 
produced equally from both races." 

If, therefore, the black ministers whose hue 
he so much despises do possess the training and 
influence rendering them eligible and securing 
their election to the situations we are consider- 
ing, it must follow that their tenure of office 
would be of equal duration with that of in- 
dividuals of the white race under the same 
conditions. Not content with making him- 



WEST INDIAN CONFEDERATION. 189 

self the mouthpiece of English gentlemen in 
this matter, our author, with characteristic 
hardihood, obtrudes himself into the same post 
on behalf of Negroes ; saying that, in the event 
of even a bankrupt peer accepting the situation 
of governor-general over them, "The blacks 
themselves would despise him " ! 

Mr. Froude may pertinently be asked here 
the source whence he derived his certainty on 
this point, inasmuch as it is absolutely at 
variance with all that is sensible and natural ; 
for surely it is both foolish and monstrous to 
suppose that educated men would infer the 
degradation of any one from the fact of such a 
one consenting to govern and co-operate with 
themselves for their own welfare. He further 
asks on the same subject : — 

" And if the governor is to be one of their 
own race and colour, how long could such a 
connection endure ? " 

Our answer must be the same as with 
regard to the duration of the black council and 
black prime minister carrying out the govern- 
ment under the same conditions. It must be 
regretted that no indication in his book, so 
far as it professes to deal with facts and with 



i 9 o FROUDACITY. 

persons not within the circle of his clients, 
would justify a belief that its wanton misstate- 
ments have filtrated through a mind entitled to 
declare, with the authority of self-consciousness, 
what a gentleman would or would not do under 
given circumstances. 

In reiteration of his favourite doctrine of the 
antagonism between the black and white races, 
our author continues on the same page to 
say : — 

" No one, I presume, would advise that the 
whites of the island should govern. The rela- 
tions between the two populations are too em- 
bittered, and equality once established by law, 
the exclusive privilege of colour over colour 
cannot be restored. While slavery continued, 
the whites ruled effectively and economically ; 
the blacks are now as they." 

As far as could possibly be endeavoured, 
every proof has been crowded into this book in 
refutation of this favourite allegation of Mr. 
Froude's. It is only an idle waste of time to 
be thus harping on his colour topic. No one 
can deserve to govern simply because he is 
white, and no one is bound to be subject 
simply because he is black. The whole of West 



WEST INDIAN CONFEDERA TION. 1 9 1 

Indian history, even after the advent of the 
attorney-class, proves this, in spite of the efforts 
to secure exclusive white domination at a time 
when crude political power might have secured it. 

" The relations between the two populations 
are too embittered," says Mr. Froude. No 
doubt his talk on this point would be true, 
had any such skin-dominancy as he contem- 
plates been officially established ; but as at 
present most officials are appointed (locally at 
least) according to their merit, and not to their 
epidermis, nothing is known of the embittered 
relations so constantly dinned into our ears. 
Whatever bitterness exists is in the minds of 
those gentry who would like to be dominant 
on the cheap condition of showing a simple 
bodily accident erected by themselves into an 
evidence and proof of superiority. 

" The exclusive privilege of colour over 
colour cannot be restored." Never in the 
history of the British West Indies — must we 
again state — was there any law or usage estab- 
lishing superiority in privileges for any sec- 
tion of the community on account of colour. 
This statement of fact is also and again an 
answer to, and refutation of, the succeeding alle- 



i 9 2 FROUDACITY. 

gation that, " While slavery continued, the whites 
ruled effectively and economically." It will be 
yet more clearly shown in a later part of this 
essay that during slavery, in fact for upwards of 
two centuries after its introduction, the West 
Indies were ruled by slave-owners, who happened 
to be of all colours, the means of purchasing 
slaves and having a plantation being the one 
exclusive consideration in the case. It is, 
therefore, contrary to fact to represent the 
Whites exclusively as ruling, and the Blacks 
indiscriminately as subject. 

He goes on to say, " There are two classes 
in the community ; their interests are opposite 
as they are now understood." As regards the 
above, Mr. Froude's attention may be called to 
the fact that classification in no department of 
science has ever been based on colour, but on re- 
lative affinity in certain salient qualities. To 
use his own figure, no horse or dog is more or 
less a horse or dog because it happens to be 
white or black. No teacher marshals his pupils 
into classes according to any outward physical 
distinction, but according to intellectual ap- 
proximation. In like manner there has been 
wealth for hundreds of men of Ethiopic origin, 



WEST INDIAN CONFEDERA TION. 193 

and poverty for hundreds of men of Caucasian 
origin, and the reverse, in both cases. We 
have, therefore, had hundreds of black as well 
as white men who, under providential dispensa- 
tion, belonged to the class, rich men ; while, 
on the other hand, we have had hundreds of 
white men who, under providential dispensa- 
tion, belonged to the class, poor men. Simi- 
larly, in the composition of a free mixed 
community, we have hundreds of both races 
belonging to the class, competent and eligible ; 
and hundreds of both races belonging to the 
class, incompetent and ineligible : to both of 
which classes all possible colours might belong. 
It is from the first mentioned that are selected 
those who are to bear the rule, to which the 
latter class is, in the very nature of things, 
bound to be subject. There is no government 
by reason merely of skins. The diversity of 
individual intelligence and circumstances is 
large enough to embrace the possibility of even 
children being, in emergencies, the most com- 
petent influencers of opinion and action. 

But let us analyse this matter for just a 
while more. The fatal objection to all Mr. 
Froude's advocacy of colour-domination is that 

13 



i 9 4 FR0UDAC1TY. 

it is futile from being morally unreasonable. 
In view of the natural and absolute impossi- 
bility of reviving the same external conditions 
under which the inordinate deference and sub- 
mission to white persons were both logically 
and inevitably engendered and maintained, his 
efforts to talk people into a frame of mind 
favourable to his views on this subject are but 
a melancholy waste of well-turned sentences. 
Man's estimate of his fellow-man has not and 
never can have any other standard, save and 
except what is the outcome of actual circum- 
stances influencing his sentiment. In the 
primitive ages, when the fruits of the earth 
formed the absorbing object of attention and 
interest, the men most distinguished for success- 
ful culture of the soil enjoyed, as a consequence, 
a larger share than others of popular admiration 
and esteem. Similarly, among nomadic tribes, 
the hunters whose courage coped victoriously 
with the wild and ferocious denizens of the 
forest became the idols of those who witnessed 
and were preserved by such sylvan exploits. 
When men came at length to venture in ships 
over the trackless deep in pursuit of commerce 
and its gains, the mariner grew important in 



WEST INDIAN CONFEDERATION. 195 

public estimation. The pursuit of commerce 
and its gains led naturally to the possession 
of wealth. This, from the quasi-omnipotence 
with which it invests men — enabling them 
not only to command the best energies, but 
also, in many cases, to subvert the very 
principles of their fellows — has, in the vast 
majority of cases, an overpowering sway on 
human opinion : a sway that will endure till 
the\ Millennium shall have secured for the 
righteous alone the sovereignty of the world. 
Likewise, as cities were founded and constitu- 
tions established, those who were foremost as 
defenders of the national interests, on the field 
of bodily conflict or in the. intellectual arena, 
became in the eyes of their contemporaries 
worthiest of appreciation — and so on of other 
circumstances through which particular personal 
distinctions created claims to preference. 

In the special case of the Negroes kidnapped 
out of Africa into foreign bondage, the crowning 
item in their assessment of their alien enslavers 
was the utter superiority, over their most re- 
doubtable " big men," which those enslavers dis- 
played. They actually subjugated and put in 
chains, like the commonest peasants, native 



196 FROUDACITY. 

potentates at whose very names even the warrior- 
hood of their tribes had been wont to blench. 
But far surpassing even this in awful effect was 
the doom meted out to the bush-handlers, the 
medicine-men, the rain-compellers, erewhile so 
inscrutably potent for working out the bliss 
or the bale of friend or enemy. " Lo, from no 
mountain-top, from no ceiba-hollow in the forest 
recesses, has issued any interposing sign, any 
avenging portent, to vindicate the Spirit of 
Darkness so foully outraged in the hitherto 
inviolate person of his chosen minister ! Verily, 
even the powers of the midnight are impotent 
against these invaders from beyond the mighty 
salt-water ! Here, huddled together in con- 
fused, hopeless misery and ruin, lie, fettered 
and prostrate, even priest as well as poten- 
tate, undistinguishable victims of crude, un- 
blenching violence, with its climax of nefarious 
sacrilege. We, common mortals, therefore, can 
hope for no deliverance from, or even succour 
in, the woful plight thus dismally contrived for 
us all by the fair-skinned race who have now 
become our masters." Such was naturally the 
train of thought that ran through those forlorn 
bosoms. The formidable death-dealing guns 



WEST INDIAN CONFEDERATION. 197 

of the invaders, the ships which had brought 
them to the African shores, and much besides 
in startling contrast to their own condition of 
utter helplessness, the Africans at once inter- 
preted to themselves as the manifestation and 
inherent attributes of beings of a higher order 
than man. Their skin, too, the difference 
whereof from their own had been accentuated 
by many calamitous incidents, was hit upon as 
the reason of so crushing an ascendency. 

White skin therefore became, in those dis- 
consolate eyes, the symbol of fearful irresistible 
power : which impression was not at all weakened 
afterwards by the ineffable atrocities of the 
"middle-passage." Backed ultimately by their 
absolute and irresponsible masterhood at home 
over the deported Blacks, the European abduc- 
tors could easily render permanent in the minds 
of their captives the abject terror struck into 
them by the enormities of which they had been 
the victims. Now, the impressions we touched 
upon before bringing forward the case of the 
Negro slaves were mainly produced by plea- 
surable circumstances. But of a contrary nature 
and much more deeply graven are those senti- 
ments which are the outcome of hopeless terror 



198 FROUDACITY. 

and pain. For whilst impressions of the former 
character glide into the consciousness through 
accesses no less normal than agreeable, the in- 
fusion of fear by means of bodily suffering is a 
process too violent to be forgotten by minds 
tortured and strained to unnatural tension there- 
by. Such tension, oft-recurrent and scarcely 
endurable, leaves behind it recollections which 
are in themselves a source of sadness. But 
time, favoured by a succession of pleasurable 
experiences, is a sovereign anodyne to remem- 
brances of this poignant class. No wonder, 
then, from our foregoing detail of facts, that 
whiteness of skin was both redoubted and 
tremblingly crouched to by Negroes on whom 
Europeans had wrought such unspeakable 
calamities. Time, however, and the action of 
circumstances, especially in countries subject to 
Catholic dominion, soon began to modify the 
conditions under which this sentiment of terror 
had been maintained, and, with those condi- 
tions, the very sentiment itself. For it was 
not long in the life of many of the expa- 
triated Africans before members of their own 
race obtained freedom, and, eventually, wealth 
sufficient for purchasing black slaves on their 



WEST INDIAN CONFEDERATION. 199 

own account. In other respects, too (outwardly 
at least), the prosperous career of such in- 
dividual Blacks could not fail to induce a 
revulsion of thought, whereby the attribution 
of unapproachable powers exclusively to the 
Whites became a matter earnestly reconsidered 
by the Africans. Centuries of such reconsidera- 
tion have produced the natural result in the 
West Indies. With the daily competition in 
intelligence, refinement, and social and moral 
distinction, which time and events have brought 
about between individuals of the two races, 
nothing, surely, has resulted, nor has even been 
indicated, to re-infuse the ancient colour-dread 
into minds which had formerly been forced to 
entertain it ; and still less to engender it in 
bosoms to which such a feeling cannot, in the 
very nature of things, be an inborn emotion. 
Now, can Mr. Froude show us by what process 
he would be able to infuse in the soul of an 
entire population a sentiment which is both 
unnatural and beyond compulsion ? 

The foregoing remarks roughly apply to pre- 
eminence given to outward distinction, and the 
conditions under which mainly it impresses and 
is accepted by men not yet arrived at the 



2oo FRO UD A CITY. 

essentially intellectual stage. In the spiritual 
domain the conditions have ever been quite 
different. A belief in the supernatural being 
inborn in man, the professors of knowledge 
and powers beyond natural attainment were 
by common consent accorded a distinct and 
superior consideration, deemed proper to the 
sacredness of their progression. Hence the 
supremacy of the priestly caste in every age 
and country of the world. Potentate as well 
as peasant have bowed in reverence before it, 
as representing and declaring with authority the 
counsels of that Being whom all, priest, poten- 
tate and peasant alike, acknowledge and adore, 
each according to the measure of his inward 
illumination. 



The Neqfjo a;s a Wof(kef}. 



Th£ laziness, the incurable idleness, of the 
Negro, was, both immediately before their 
emancipation in 1838, and for long years after 
that event, the cuckoo-cry of their white 
detractors. It was laziness, pure and simple, 
which hindered the Negro from exhausting 
himself under a tropical sun, toiling at starva- 
tion wages to ensure for his quondam master 
the means of being an idler himself, with the 
additional luxury of rolling in easily come-by 
wealth. Within the last twenty years, however, 
the history of the Black Man, both in the West 
Indies and, better still, in the United States of 
America, has been a succession of achievements 
which have converted the charge of laziness 
into a baseless and absurd calumny. The 
repetition of the charge referred to is, in these 



202 FROUDACITY. 

waning days of the nineteenth century, a dis- 
credited anachronism, which, however, has no 
deterring features for Mr. Froude. As the 
running down of the Negro was his cue, he 
went in boldly for the game, with what result 
we shall presently see. At page 239, our 
author, speaking of the Negro garden-farms in 
Jamaica, says : — 

" The male proprietors were lounging about 
smoking. Their wives, as it was market-day, 
were tramping into Kingston with their baskets 
on their heads. We met them literally in 
thousands, all merry and light-hearted, their 
little ones with little baskets trudging at their 
side. Of the lords of the creation we saw, 
perhaps, one to each hundred of the women, 
and he would be riding on mule or donkey, pipe 
in mouth and carrying nothing. He would be 
generally sulky too, while the ladies, young and 
old, had a civil word for us, and curtsied under 
their loads. Decidedly if there is to be a black 
constitution I will give my vote to the women." 

To the above direct imputation of indolence, 
heartlessness, and moroseness, Mr. Froude 
appends the following remarks on other moral 
characteristics of certain sable peasants at 



THE NEGRO AS A WORKER. 203 

Mandeville, Jamaica, given on the authority of 
a police official, who, our author says, described 
them as — 

" Good-humoured, but not universally honest. 
They stole cattle, and would not give evidence 
against each other. If brought into Court, they 
held a pebble in their mouth, being under the 
impression that when they were so provided, 
perjury did not count. Their education was 
only skin-deep, and the schools which the Govern- 
ment provided had not touched their characters 
at all!' 

But how could the education so provided be 
otherwise than futile when the administration 
of its details is entirely in the hands of persons 
unsympathizing with and utterly despising the 
Negro ? But of this more anon and elsewhere. 
We resume Mr. Froude's evidence respecting 
the black peasantry. Our author proceeds to 
admit, on the same subject, that his informant's 
duties (as a police official) ' ' brought him in 
contact with the unfavourable specimens." He 
adds : — 

" I received a far pleasanter impression from 
a Moravian minister. ... I was particularly 
odad to see this gentleman, for .of the Moravians 



2o 4 FROUDACITY. 

every one had spoken well to me. He was not 
the least enthusiastic about his poor black sheep, 
but he said that if they were not better than the 
average English labourer, he did not think them 
worse. They were called idle ; they would work 
well enough if they had fair wages and if the 
wages were paid regularly ; but what could be 
expected when women servants had but three 
shillings a week and found themselves, when the 
men had but a shilling a day and the pay was 
kept in arrear in order that if they came late to 
work, or if they came irregularly, it may be kept 
back or cut down to what the employer choose to 
give f Under suck conditions any man of any 
colour would prefer to work for himself if he 
had a garden, or would be idle if he had none." 

Take, again, the following extract regarding 
the heroism of the emigrants to the Canal :— 

" I walked forward " (on the steamer bound 
to Jamaica), " after we had done talking. We 
had five hundred of the poor creatures on their 
way to the Darien pandemonium. The vessel 
was rolling with a heavy beam sea. I found the 
whole mass of them reduced to the condition 
of the pigs who used to occupy the fore decks 
on the Cork and Bristol packets. They were 



THE NEGRO AS A WORKER. 205 

lying in a confused heap together, helpless, 
miserable, without consciousness, apparently, 
save a sense in each that he was wretched. 
Unfortunate brothers-in-law ! following the laws 
of political economy, and carrying their labour 
to the dearest market, where, before a year was 
out, half of them were to die. They had souls, 
too, some of them, and honest and kindly hearts." 

It surely is refreshing to read the revelation 
of his first learning of the possession of a soul 
by a fellow-human being, thus artlessly described 
by one who is said to be an ex-parson. But 
piquancy is Mr. Froude's strong point, whatever 
else he may be found wanting in. 

Still, apart from Mr. Froude's direct testi- 
mony to the fact that from year to year, during 
a long series of years, there has been a con- 
tinuous, scarcely ever interrupted emigration 
of Negroes to the Spanish mainland, in search 
of work for a sufficing livelihood for them- 
selves and their families — and that in the 
teeth of physical danger, pestilence, and death — 
there would be enough indirect exoneration of 
the Black Man from that indictment in the wail 
of Mr. Froude and his friends regarding the 
alarming absorption of the lands of Grenada 



206 FROUDACITY. 

and Trinidad by sable proprietors. Land can- 
not be bought without money, nor can money 
be possessed except through labour, and the 
fact that so many tens of thousand Blacks are 
now the happy owners of the soil whereon, in 
the days so bitterly regretted by our author, 
their forefathers' tears, nay, very hearts' blood, 
had been caused to flow, ought to silence for 
ever an accusation, which, were it even true, 
would be futile, and, being false, is worse than 
disgraceful, coming from the lips of the Eu- 
molpids who would fain impose a not-to-be- 
questioned yoke on us poor helots of Ethiopia. 
It is said that lying is the vice of slaves ; but 
the ethics of West Indian would-be mastership 
assert, on its behalf, that they alone should 
enjoy the privilege of resorting to misrepre- 
sentation to give colour, if not solidity, to their 
pretensions. 



f^EJJQIOJM fOF( Neqf(OE£. 



Mr. Froude's passing on from matters secular 
to matters spiritual and sacred was a transition 
to be expected in the course of the grave and 
complicated discussion which he had volunteered 
to initiate. It was, therefore, not without 
curiosity that his views in the direction above 
indicated were sought for and earnestly scru- 
tinized by us. But worse than in his treatment 
of purely mundane subjects, his attitude here 
is marked by a nonchalant levity which excites 
our wonder that even he should have touched 
upon the spiritual side of his thesis at all. The 
idea of the dove sent forth from the ark fluttering 
over the heaving swells of the deluge, in vain 
endeavour to secure a rest for the soles of its 
feet, represents not inaptly the unfortunate pre- 
dicament of his spirit with regard to a solid 



2 o8 FROUDACITY. 

faith on which to repose amid the surges of 
doubt by which it is so evidently beset. Yet 
although this is his obvious plight with regard 
to a satisfying belief, he nevertheless under- 
takes, with characteristic confidence, to suggest 
a creed for the moralization of West Indian 
Negroes. His language is : — 

" A religion, at any rate, which will keep the 
West Indian blacks from falling back into 
devil-worship is still to seek. In spite of the 
priests, child-murder and cannibalism have re- 
appeared in Hayti, but without them things 
might have been much worse than they are, and 
the preservation of white authority and influence 
in any form at all may be better than none." 

We discern in the foregoing citation the 
exercise of a charity that is unquestionably 
born of fetish-worship, which, whether it be 
obeah generally, or restricted to a mere human 
skin, can be so powerful an agent in the forma- 
tion and retention of beliefs. Hence we see 
that our philosopher relies here, in the domain 
of morals and spiritual ethics, on a white skin 
as implicitly as he does on its sovereign potency 
in secular politics. The curiousness of the 
matter lies mainly in its application to natives 



RELIGION FOR NEGROES. 209 

of Hayti, of all people in the world. As a 
matter of fact we have had our author declaring 
as follows, in climax to his oft-repeated pre- 
dictions about West Indian Negroes degenera- 
ting into the condition of their fellow- Negroes 
in the " Black Republic " (p. 285) :— 

" Were it worth while, one might draw a 
picture of an English governor, with a black 
parliament and a black ministry, recommending, 
by advice of his constitutional ministers, some 
measure like the Haytian Land Law." 

Now, as the West Indies degenerating into 
so many white-folk-detesting Haytis, under our 
prophet's dreaded supremacy of the Blacks, is 
the burden of his book ; and as the Land Law 
in question distinctly forbids the owning by 
any white person of even one inch of the soil 
of the Republic, it might, but for the above 
explanation, have seemed unaccountable, in 
view of the implacable distrust, not to say 
hatred, which this stern prohibition so clearly 
discloses, that our author should, nevertheless, 
rely on the efficacy of white authority and 
influence over Haytians. 

In continuation of his religious suggestions, 
he goes on to descant upon slavery in the 

14 



2io FRO UD A CITY. 

fashion which we have elsewhere noticed, but 
it may still be proper to add a word or two here 
regarding this particular disquisition of his. 
This we are happy in being able to do under 
the guidance of an anterior and more reliable 
exponent of ecclesiastical as well as secular 
obedience on the part of all free and en- 
lightened men in the present epoch of the 
world's history : — 

" Dogma and Descent, potential twin 
Which erst could rein submissive millions in, 
Are now spent forces on the eddying surge 
Of Thought enfranchised. Agencies emerge 
Unhampered by the incubus of dread 
Which cramped men's hearts and clogged their 

onward tread. 
Dynasty, Prescription ! spectral in these days 
When Science points to Thought its surest ways, 
And men who scorn obedience when not free 
Demand the logic of Authority ! 
The day of manhood to the world is here, 
And ancient homage waxes faint and drear. 

Vision of rapture ! See Salvation's plan 

■ — Tis serving God through ceaseless toil for man ! " 

The lines above quoted are by a West 
Indian Negro, and explain in very concise 
form the attitude of the educated African mind 



RELIGION FOR NEGROES. 2 1 1 

with reference to the matters they deal with. 
Mr. Froude is free to perceive that no special 
religion patched up from obsolete creeds could 
be acceptable to those with whose sentiments 
the thoughts of the writer just quoted are in 
true racial unison. It is preposterous to ex- 
pect that the same superstition regarding skin 
ascendency, which is now so markedly played 
out in our Colonies in temporal matters, could 
have any weight whatsoever in matters so 
momentous as morals and religion. But grant- 
ing even the possibility of any code of worldly 
ethics or of religion being acceptable on the 
dermal score so strenuously insisted on by 
him, it is to be feared that, through sheer 
respect for the fitness of things, the intelligent 
Negro in search of guidance in faith and morals 
would fail to recognize in our author a guide, 
philosopher, and friend, to be followed without 
the most painful misgivings. The Catholic 
and the Dissenting Churches which have done 
so much for the temporal and spiritual advance- 
ment of the Negro, in spite of hindrance and 
active persecution wherever these were possible, 
are, so far as is visible, maintaining their hold 
on the adhesion of those who belong to them. 



212 FR0UDAC1TY. 

And it cannot be pretended that, among en- 
lightened Africans as compared with other 
enlightened people, there have been more 
grievous fallings off from the scriptural stan- 
dard of deportment. Possible it certainly is 
that considerations akin to, or even identical 
with, those relied upon by Mr. Froude might, 
on the first reception of Christianity in their 
exile, have operated effectually upon the minds 
of the children of Africa. At that time the 
evangelizers whose converts they so readily 
became possessed the recommendation of be- 
longing to the dominant caste. Therefore, with 
the humility proper to their forlorn condition, 
the poor bondsmen requited with intense grati- 
tude such beneficent interest on their behalf, 
as a condescension to which people in their 
hapless situation could have had no right. But 
for many long years, the distinction whether of 
temporal or of spiritual superiority has ceased 
to be the monopoly of any particular class. The 
master and employer has for far more than a 
century and a half been often represented in 
the West Indies by some born African or his 
descendant ; and so also has the teacher and 
preacher. It is not too much to say that 



RELIGION FOR NEGROES. 2 1 3 

the behaviour of the liberated slaves through- 
out the British Antilles, as well as the de- 
portment of the manumitted four million 
slaves of the Southern United States later on, 
bore glorious testimony to the humanizing 
effects which the religion of charity, clutched 
at and grasped in fragments, and understood 
with childlike incompleteness, had produced 
within those suffering bosoms. 

Nothing has occurred to call for a remodelling 
of the ordinary moral and spiritual machinery 
for the special behoof of Negroes. Religion, 
as understood by the best of men, is purely 
a matter of feeling and action between man 
and man — the doing unto others as we would 
they should do unto us ; and any creed or any 
doctrine which directly or indirectly subverts 
or even weakens this basis is in itself a danger 
to the highest welfare of mankind. The simple 
conventional faith in God, in Jesus, and in a 
future state, however modified nowadays, has 
still a vitality which can restrain and ennoble 
its votaries, provided it be inculcated and re- 
ceived in a befitting spirit. Our critic, in the 
plenitude of his familiarity with such matters, 
confidently asks : — 



214 FROUDACITY. 

"Who is now made wretched by the fear of 
hell?" 

Possibly the belief in the material hell, the 
decadence of which he here triumphantly as- 
sumes to be so general, may have considerably 
diminished ; but experience has shown that, 
with the advance of refinement, there is a con- 
current growth in the intensity of moral sen- 
sibility, whereby the waning terrors of a future 
material hell are more than replaced by the 
agonies of a conscience self-convicted of wilful 
violation of the right. The same simple faith 
has, in its practical results, been rich in the 
records of the humble whom it has exalted ; 
of the poor to whom it has been better than 
wealth ; of the rich whose stewardship of 
worldly prosperity it has sanctified ; of the 
timid whom it has rendered bold ; and of the 
valiant whom it has raised to a divine heroism 
— in fine, of miracles of transformation that 
have impelled to higher and nobler tendencies 
and uses the powers and gifts inherited or 
acquired by man in his natural state. They 
who possess this faith, and cherish it as a price- 
less possession, may calmly oppose to the 
philosophic reasoning against the existence of 



RELIGION FOR NEGROES. 2 1 5 

a Deity and the rationalness of entreating Him 
in prayer, the simple and sufficient declaration, 
" I believe." Normal-minded men, sensible of 
the limitations of human faculties, never aspire 
to be wise beyond what is revealed. Whatever 
might exist beyond the grave is, so far as man 
and man in their mutual relations are concerned, 
not a subject that discussion can affect or specu- 
lation unravel. To believers it cannot matter 
whether the Sermon on the Mount embodies or 
does not embody the quality of ethics that the 
esoteric votaries of Mr. Froude's " new creed " 
do accept or even can tolerate. Under the old 
creed man's sense of duty kindled in sympathy 
towards his brother, urging him to achieve 
by self-sacrifice every possibility of bene- 
ficence ; hence the old creed insured an inward 
joy as well as "the peace which passeth all 
understanding." There can be no room for 
desiring left, when receptiveness of blessings 
overflows ; and it is the worthiest direction of 
human energy to secure for others that fulness 
of fruition. Is not Duty the first, the highest 
item of moral consciousness ; and is not pro- 
moting, according to our best ability, the 
welfare of our fellow-creatures, the first and 



216 FROUDACITY. 

most urgent call of human duty ? Can the 
urgency of such responsibility ever cease but 
with the capacity, on our own or on our 
brother's part, to do or be done by respec- 
tively ? Contemptuously ignoring his share of 
this solemn responsibility — solemn, whether 
regarded from a religious or a purely secular 
point of view — to observe at least the negative 
obligation never to wantonly do or even devise 
any harm to his fellows, or indeed any sentient 
creature, our new apostle affords, in his light- 
hearted reversal of the prescriptive methods 
of civilized ethics, a woful foretaste of the moral 
results of the " new, not as yet crystallized " 
belief, whose trusted instruments of spiritual 
investigation are the telescope and mental ana- 
lysis, in order to satisfy the carpings of those 
who so impress the world with their super- 
human strong-mindedness. 

The following is a profound reflection pre- 
senting, doubtless, quite a new revelation to 
an unsophisticated world, which had so long 
submitted in reverential tameness to the 
self-evident impossibility of exploring the 
Infinite : — 

" The tendency of popular thought is against 



RELIGION FOR NEGROES. 217 

the supernatural in any shape. Far into space 
as the telescope can search, deep as analysis can 
penetrate into mind and consciousness or the 
forces which govern natural things, popular 
thought finds only uniformity and connection of 
cause and effect ; no sign anywhere of a per- 
sonal will which is influenced by prayer or 
moral motives." 

How much to be pitied are the gifted 
esoterics who, in such a quest, vainly point 
their telescopes into the star-thronged firma- 
ment, and plunge their reasoning powers into 
the abyss of consciousness and such - like 
mysteries ! The commonplace intellect of the 
author of " Night Thoughts" was, if we may 
so speak, awed into an adoring rapture which 
forced from him the exclamation (may believers 
hail it as a dogma !) — 

" An undevout astronomer is mad ! " 

Most probably it was in weak submission to 
some such sentiment as this that Isaac Newton 
nowhere in his writings suggests even the ghost 
of a doubt of there being a Great Architect 
of the Universe as the outcome of his tele- 
scopic explorations into the illimitable heavens. 



218 FROUDACITY. 

It is quite possible, too, that he was, " on in- 
sufficient grounds," perhaps, perfectly satisfied, 
as a host of other intellectual mediocrities like 
himself have been, and even up to now rather 
provokingly continue to be, with the very 
"uniformity and connection of cause and 
effect" as visible evidence of there being not 
only "a personal will," but a creative and 
controlling Power as well. In this connection 
comes to mind a certain old Book which, what- 
ever damage Semitic Scholarship and Modern 
Criticism may succeed in inflicting on its 
contents, will always retain for the spiritual 
guidance of the world enough and to spare 
of divine suggestions. With the prescience 
which has been the heritage of the inspired 
in all ages, one of the writers in that Book, 
whom we shall now quote, foresaw, no doubt, 
the deplorable industry of Mr. Froude and his 
protdgi u popular thought," whose mouth-piece 
he has so characteristically constituted himself, 
and asks in a tone wherein solemn warning 
blends with inquiry : " Canst thou by searching 
find out God ; canst thou find out the Almighty 
unto perfection ! " The rational among the 
most loftily endowed of mankind have grasped 



RELIGION FOR NEGROES. 219 

the sublime significance of this query, ac- 
quiescing reverently in its scarcely veiled in- 
timation of man's impotence in presence of the 
task to which it refers. 

But though Mr. Froude's spiritual plight be 
such as we have just allowed him to state it, 
with regard to an object of faith and a motive 
of worship, yet let us hear him, in his anxiety 
to furbish up a special Negro creed, setting 
forth the motive for being in a hurry to antici- 
pate the " crystallization " of his new belief: — 

" The new creed, however, not having 
crystallized as yet into a shape which can 
be openly professed, and as without any creed 
at all the flesh and the devil might become too 
powerful, we maintain the old names, as we 
maintain the monarchy." 

The allusion to the monarchy seems not a 
very obvious one, as it parallels the definitive 
rejection of a spiritual creed with the theo- 
retical change of ancient notions regarding 
a concrete fact. At any rate we have it that 
his special religion, when concocted and dis- 
seminated, will have the effect of preventing 
the flesh and the devil from having too much 
power over Negroes. The objection to the 



220 FROUDACITY. 

devil's sway seems to us to come with queer 
grace from one who owes his celebrity chiefly 
to the production of works teeming with that 
peculiar usage of language of which the Enemy 
of Souls is credited with the special father- 
hood. 

No, sir, in the name of the Being regarding 
whose existence you and your alleged " popular 
thought " are so painfully in doubt, we protest 
against your right, or that of any other created 
worm, to formulate for the special behoof of 
Negroes any sort of artificial creed unbelieved 
in by yourself, having the function and effect of 
detective " shadowings " of their souls. Away 
with your criminal suggestion of toleration of the 
hideous orgies of heathenism in Hayti for the 
benefit of our future morals in the West Indies, 
when the political supremacy which you predict 
and dread and deprecate shall have become an 
accomplished fact. Were any special standard 
of spiritual excellence required, our race has, in 
Josiah Henson and Sojourner Truth, sufficing 
models for our men and our women respectively. 
Their ideal of Christian life, which we take to 
be the true one, is not to be judged of with 
direct reference to the Deity whom we cannot 



RELIGION FOR NEGROES. 221 

see, interrogate, or comprehend, but to its prac- 
tical bearing in and on man, whom we can see 
and have cognizance of, not only with our 
physical senses, but by the intimations of the 
divinity which abides within us. 1 We can see, 
feel, and appreciate the virtue of a fellow-mortal 
who consecrates himself to the Divine idea 
through untiring exertion for the bettering 
of the condition of the world around him, 
whose agony he makes it his duty, only to 
satisfy his burning desire, to mitigate. The 
fact in its ghastly reality lies before us that the 
majority of mankind labour and are being 
crushed under the tremendous trinity of Igno- 
rance, Vice, and Poverty. 

It is mainly in the succouring of those who 
thus suffer that the vitality of the old creed 
is manifested in the person of its professors. 
Under this aspect we behold it moulding men, 
of all nations, countries, and tongues, whose 
virtues have challenged and should command 
on its behalf the unquestioning faith and 
adhesion of every rational observer. " Evi- 
dences of Christianity," " Controversies," 
" Exegetical Commentaries," have all proved 

1 " Est deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo." — Ovid. 



222 FROUDACITY. 

more or less futile — as perhaps they ought — 
with the Science and Modern Criticism which 
perverts religion into a matter of dialectics. 
But there is a hope for mankind in the fact that 
Science itself shall have ultimately to admit the 
limitations of human inquiry into the details of 
the Infinite. Meanwhile it requires no technical 
proficiency to recognize the criminality of those 
who waste their brief threescore and ten years 
in abstract speculations, while the tangible, 
visible, and hideous soul-destroying trinity of 
Vice, Ignorance, and Poverty, above men- 
tioned, are desolating the world in their very 
sight. There are possessors of personal virtue, 
enlightenment, and wealth, who dare stand 
neutral with regard to these dire exigencies 
among their fellows. And yet they are the 
logical helpers, as holders of the special antidote 
to each of those banes ! Infinitely more de- 
serving of execration are such folk than the 
callous owner of some specific, who allows a 
suffering neighbour to perish for want of it. 

We who believe in the ultimate develop- 
ment of the Christian notion of duty towards 
God, as manifested in untiring beneficence to 
man, cling to this faith — starting from the 



RELIGION FOR NEGROES. 223 

beginning of the New Testament dispensa- 
tion — because Saul of Tarsus, transformed into 
Paul the Apostle" through his whole-souled 
acceptance of this very creed with its prac- 
tical responsibilities, has, in his ardent, inde- 
fatigable labours for the enlightenment and 
elevation of his fellows, left us a lesson which 
is an enduring inspiration ; because Augustine, 
Bishop of Hippo, benefited, in a manner which 
has borne, and ever will bear, priceless fruit, 
enormous sections of the human family, after 
his definite submission to the benign yoke 
of the same old creed ; because Vincent de 
Paul has, through the identical inspiration, 
endowed the world with his everlasting legacy 
of organized beneficence ; because it impelled 
Francis Xavier with yearning heart and eager 
footsteps through thousands of miles of peril, 
to proclaim to the darkling millions of India 
what he had experienced to be tidings of 
great joy to himself ; because Matthew Hale, a 
lawyer, and of first prominence in a pursuit 
which materializes the mind and nips its 
native candour and tenderness, escaped un- 
blighted, through the saving influence of his 
faith, approving himself in the sight of all 



224 FR0UDAC1TY. 

an ideal judge, even according to the highest 
conception ; because John Howard, opulent 
and free to enjoy his opulence and repose, was 
drawn thereby throughout the whole continent 
of Europe in quest of the hidden miseries 
that torture those whom the law has shut out, 
in dungeons, from the light and sympathy of the 
world ; because Thomas Clarkson, animated by 
the spirit of its teachings, consecrated wealth, 
luxury, and the quiet of an entire lifetime on 
the altar of voluntary sacrifice for the salvation 
of an alien people ; because Samuel Johnson, 
shut out from mirthfulness by disease and suffer- 
ing, and endowed with an intellectual pride 
intolerant of froward ignorance, was, through 
the chastening power of that belief, transformed 
into the cheerful minister and willing slave of 
the weaklings whom he gathered into his home, 
and around whom the tendrils of his heart had 
entwined themselves, waxing closer and stronger 
in the moisture of his never-failing charity ; 
because Henry Havelock, a man of the sword, 
whose duties have never been too propitious to 
the cultivation and fostering of the gentler virtues, 
lived and died a blameless hero, constrained by 
that faith to be one of its most illustrious ex- 



RELIGION FOR NEGROES. 225 

emplars ; because David Livingstone looms 
great and reverend in our mental sight in his 
devotion to a lancT and race embraced in his 
boundless fellow-feeling, and whose miseries 
he has commended to the sympathy of the 
civilized world in words the pathos whereof has 
melted thousands of once obdurate hearts to 
crave a share in applying a balm to the " open 
sore of Africa" — that slave-trade whose number- 
less horrors beggar description ; and finally — one 
more example out of the countless varieties of 
types that blend into a unique solidarity in the 
active manifestation of the Christian life — we 
believe because Charles Gordon, the martyr- 
soldier of Khartoum, in trusting faith a very 
child, but in heroism more notable than 
any mere man of whom history contains a 
record, gathered around himself, through the 
sublime attractiveness of his faith-directed 
life, the united suffrages of all nations, and 
now enjoys, as the recompense and seal of his 
life's labours, an apotheosis in homage to which 
the heathen of Africa, the man-hunting Arab, 
the Egyptian, the Turk, all jostle each other 
to blend with the exulting children of Britain 
who are directly glorified by his life and history. 

J 5 



226 FROUDACITY. 

Here, then, are speaking evidences of the 
believers' grounds. Verily they are of the kind 
that are to be seen in our midst, touched, heard, 
listened to, respected, beloved — nay, honoured, 
too, with the glad worship our inward spirit 
springs forth to render to goodness so largely 
plenished from the Source of all Good. Can 
Modern Science and Criticism explain them 
away, or persuade us of their insufficiency as 
incentives to the hearty acceptance of the 
religion that has received such glorious, yet 
simply logical, incarnation in the persons of 
weak, erring men who welcomed its responsi- 
bilities conjointly with its teachings, and thereby 
raised themselves to the spiritual level pictured 
to ourselves in our conception of angels who 
have been given the Divine charge concern- 
ing mankind. Religion for Negroes, indeed! 
White priests, forsooth ! This sort of arrogance 
might, possibly, avail in quarters where the 
person and pretensions of Mr. Froude could 
be impressive and influential — but here, in the 
momentous concern of man with Him who 
"is no respecter of persons," his interference, 
mentally disposed as he tells us he is with 
reference to such a matter, is nothing less 
than profane intrusion. 



RELIGION FOR NEGROES. 227 

We will conclude by stating in a few words 
our notion of the only agency by which, not 
Blacks alone, but every race of mankind, might 
be uplifted to the moral level which the thou- 
sands of examples, of which we have glanced 
at but a few, prove so indubitably the capa- 
city of man to attain — each to a degree 
limited by the scope of his individual powers. 
The priesthood whereof the world stands in 
such dire need is not at all the confederacy 
of augurs which Mr. Froude, perhaps in re- 
collection of his former profession, so glibly 
suggests, with an esoteric creed of their own, 
" crystallized into shape " for profession before 
the public. The day of priestcraft being now 
numbered with the things that were, the ex- 
ploitation of those outside of the sacerdotal 
circle is no longer possible. Therefore the re- 
ligion of mere talk, however metaphysical and 
profound ; the religion of scenic display, except 
such display be symbolic of living and active 
verities, has lost whatever of efficacy it may 
once have possessed, through the very spirit 
and tendency of To-day. The reason why those 
few whom we have mentioned, and the thou- 
sands who cannot possibly be recalled, have, as 



228 FROUDACITY. 

typical Christians, impressed themselves on the 
moral sense and sympathy of the ages, is 
simply that they lived the faith which they 
professed. Whatever words they may have em- 
ployed to express their serious thoughts were 
never otherwise than, incidentally, a spoken 
fragment of their own interior biography. In 
fine, success must infallibly attend this special 
priesthood (whether episcopally ''ordained" or 
not) of all races, all colours, all tongues whatso- 
ever, since their lives reflect their teachings and 
their teachings reflect their lives. Then, truly, 
they, "the righteous, shall inherit the earth," 
leading mankind along the highest and noblest 
paths of temporal existence. Then, of course, 
the obeah, the cannibalism, the devil-wor- 
ship of the whole world, including that of 
Hayti, which Mr. Froude predicts will be 
adopted by us Blacks in the West Indies, 
shall no more encumber and scandalize the 
earth. 

But Mr. Froude should, at the same time, 
be reminded that cannibalism and the hideous 
concomitants which he mentions are, after all, 
relatively minor and restricted dangers to man's 
civilization and moral soundness. They can 



RELIGION FOR NEGROES. 229 

neither operate freely nor expand easily. The 
paralysis of horrified popular sentiment ob- 
structs their propagation, and the blight of the 
death-penalty which hangs over the heads of 
their votaries is an additional guarantee of their 
being kept within bounds that minimize their 
perniciousness. But there are more fatal 
and further-reaching dangers to public morality 
and happiness of which the regenerated 
current opinion of the future will take prompt 
and remedial cognizance. Foremost among 
these will be the circulation of malevolent 
writings whereby the equilibrium of sym- 
pathy between good men of different races 
is sought to be destroyed, through misleading 
appeals to the weaknesses and prejudices of 
readers ; writings in which the violation of actual 
truth cannot, save by stark stupidity, be attri- 
buted to innocent error ; writings that scoff at 
humanitarian feeling and belittle the importance 
of achievements resulting therefrom; writings 
which strike at the root of national manliness, 
by eulogizing brute force directed against weaker 
folk as a fit and legitimate mode of securing 
the wishes of a mighty and enlightened people ; 
writings, in fine, which ignore the divine prin- 



230 FROUDACITY. 

ciple in man, and implicitly deny the possibility 
of a Divine Power existing outside of and above 
man, thus materializing the mind, and tending 
to render the earth a worse hell than it ever 
could have been with faith in the supremacy of 
a beneficent Power. 



BOOK IV. 



^E£Uivi£. 



Thus far we have dealt with the main questions 
raised- by Mr. Froude on the lines of his own 
choosing; lines which demonstrate to the fullest 
how unsuited his capacity is for appreciating 
— still less grappling with — the political and 
social issues he has so confidently undertaken to 
determine. In vain have we sought throughout 
his bastard philosophizing for any phrase giving 
promise of an adequate treatment of this im- 
portant subject. We find paraded ostenta- 
tiously enough the doctrine that in the adjust- 
ment of human affairs the possession of a 
white skin should be the strongest recom- 
mendation. Wonder might fairly be felt that 
there is no suggestion of a corresponding ad- 
vantage being accorded to the possession of 
a long nose or of auburn hair. Indeed, little 



234 FROUDACITY. 

or no attention that can be deemed serious is 
given to the interest of the Blacks, as a large 
and (out of Africa) no longer despicable section 
of the human family, in the great world-prob- 
lems which are so visibly preparing and press for 
definitive solutions. The intra-African Negro 
is clearly powerless to struggle successfully 
against personal enslavement, annexation, or 
volunteer forcible " protection " of his territory. 
What, we ask, will in the coming ages be the 
opinion and attitude of the extra-African 
millions — ten millions in the Western Hemi- 
sphere — dispersed so widely over the surface of 
the globe, apt apprentices in every conceivable 
department of civilized culture ? Will these 
men remain for ever too poor, too isolated from 
one another for grand racial combinations ? 
Or will the naturally opulent cradle of their 
people, too long a prey to violence and unholy 
greed, become at length the sacred watchword 
of a generation willing and able to conquer or 
perish under its inspiration ? Such large and 
interesting questions it was within the province 
and duty of a famous historian, laying confident 
claim to prophetic insight, not to propound alone, 
but also definitely to solve. The sacred power 



RESUME. 235 

of forecast, however, has been confined to 
finical pronouncements regarding those for 
whose special benefit he has exercised it, and 
to childish insults of the Blacks whose doom 
must be sealed to secure the precious result 
which is aimed at. In view of this ill-inten- 
tioned omission, we shall offer a few cursory 
remarks bearing on, but not attempting to 
answer, those grave inquiries concerning the 
African people. As in our humble opinion 
these are questions paramount to all the petty- 
local issues finically dilated on by the confident 
prophet of " The Bow of Ulysses," we will here 
briefly devote ourselves to its discussion. 

Accepting the theory of human development 
propounded by our author, let us apply it to the 
the African race. Except, of course, to in- 
telligences having a share in the Councils of 
Eternity, there can be no attainable knowledge 
respecting the laws which regulate the growth 
and progress of civilization among the races 
of the earth. That in the existence of the 
human family every age has been marked by 
its own essential characteristics with regard 
to manifestations of intellectual life, however 
circumscribed, is a proposition too self-evident 



236 FROUDACITY. 

to require more than the stating. But investi- 
gation beyond such evidence as we possess 
concerning the past — whether recorded by man 
himself in the written pages of history, or by 
the Creator on the tablets ofnature — would be 
worse than futile. We see that in the past 
different races have successively come to the 
front, as prominent actors on the world's stage. 
The years of civilized development have dawned 
in turn on many sections of the human family, 
and the Anglo-Saxons, who now enjoy pre- 
eminence, got their turn only after Egypt, 
Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome, and others 
had successively held the palm of supremacy. 
And since these mighty empires have all passed 
away, may we not then, if the past teaches 
aught, confidently expect that other racial hege- 
monies will arise in the future to keep up the 
ceaseless progression of temporal existence 
towards the existence that is eternal ? What 
is it in the nature of things that will oust the 
African race from the right to participate, in 
times to come, in the high destinies that have 
been assigned in times past to so many races 
that have not been in anywise superior to us 
in the qualifications, physical, moral, and intel- 



RESUME. 237 

lectual, that mark out a race for prominence 
amongst other races ? 

The normal composition of the typical Negro 
has the testimony of ages to its essential sound- 
ness and nobility. Physically, as an active 
labourer, he is capable of the most pro- 
tracted exertion under climatic conditions the 
most exhausting. By the mere strain of his 
brawn and sinew he has converted waste 
tracts of earth into fertile regions of agri- 
cultural bountifulness. On the scenes of strife 
he has in his savage state been known to be 
indomitable save by the stress of irresistible 
forces, whether of men or of circumstances. 
Staunch in his friendship and tender towards 
the weak directly under his protection, the un- 
vitiated African furnishes in himself the combina- 
tion of native virtue which in the land of his 
exile was so prolific of good results for the wel- 
fare of the whole slave-class. But distracted at 
home by the sudden irruptions of skulking foes, 
he has been robbed, both intellectually and 
morally, of the immense advantage of Peace, 
which is the mother of Progress. Trans- 
planted to alien climes, and through centuries 
of desolating trials, this irrepressible race has 



238 FROUDACITY. 

bated not one throb of its energy, nor one jot of 
its heart or hope. In modern times, after his 
expatriation into dismal bondage, both Britain 
and America have had occasion to see that 
even in the paralysing fetters of political and 
social degradation the right arm of the Ethiop 
can be a valuable auxiliary on the field of 
battle. Britain, in her conflict with France for 
supremacy in the West Indies, did not disdain 
the aid of the sable arms that struck together 
with those of Britons for the trophies that 
furnished the motives for those epic contests. 

Later on, the unparalleled struggle between 
the Northern and Southern States of the 
American Union put to the test the indestruc- 
tible fibres of the Negro's nature, moral as 
well as physical. The Northern States, after 
months of hesitating repugnance, and when 
taught at last by dire defeats that colour did 
not in any way help to victory, at length 
sullenly acquiesced in the comradeship, hitherto 
disdained, of the eager African contingent. The 
records of Port Hudson, Vicksburg, Morris 
Island, and elsewhere, stand forth in imperish- 
able attestation of the fact that the distinction 
of being laurelled during life as victor, or filling 



RESUME. 239 

in death a hero's _^grave, is reserved for no 
colour, but for the heart that can dare and the 
hand that can strike boldly in a righteous cause. 
The experience of the Southern slave-holders, 
on the other hand, was no less striking and 
worthy of admiration. Every man of the twelve 
seceding States forming the Southern Confed- 
eracy, then fighting desperately for the avowed 
purpose of perpetuating slavery, was called into 
the field, as no available male arm could be 
spared from the conflict on their side. Planta- 
tion owner, overseer, and every one in authority, 
had to be drafted away from the scene of 
their usual occupation to the stage whereon the 
bloody drama of internecine strife was being 
enacted. Not only the plantation, but the 
home and the household, including the mistress 
and her children, had to be left, not unprotected, 
it is glorious to observe, but, with confident 
assurance in their loyalty and good faith, under 
the protection of the four million of bondsmen, 
who, through the laws and customs of these 
very States, had been doomed to lifelong 
ignorance and exclusion from all moralizing 
influences. With what result ? The protraction 
of the conflict on the part of the South would 



240 FRO UD A CITY. 

have been impossible but for the admirable 
management and realization of their resources 
by those benighted slaves. On the other 
hand, not one of the thousands of Northern 
prisoners escaping from the durance of a 
Southern captivity ever appealed in vain for 
the assistance and protection of a Negro. 
Clearly the head and heart of those bondsmen 
were each in its proper place. The moral 
effect of these experiences of the Negroes' 
sterling qualities was not lost on either North 
or South. In the North it effaced from thou- 
sands of repugnant hearts the adverse feelings 
which had devised and accomplished so much 
to the Negro's detriment. In the South — but 
for the blunders of the Reconstructionists — it 
would have considerably facilitated the final 
readjustment of affairs between the erewhile 
master and slave in their new-born relations 
of employer and employed. 

Reverting to the Africans who were conveyed 
to places other than the States, it will be seen 
that circumstances amongst them and in their 
favour came into play, modifying and lightening 
their unhappy condition. First, attention must 
be paid to the patriotic solidarity existing 



RESUME. 241 

amongst the bondsmen, a solidarity which, in the 
case of those who had been deported in the 
same ship, had all the sanctity of blood-rela- 
tionship. Those who had thus travelled to the 
" white man's country " addressed and con- 
sidered each other as brothers and sisters. 
Hence their descendants for many generations 
upheld, as if consanguineous, the modes of 
address and treatment which became hereditary 
in families whose originals had travelled in 
the same ship. These adopted uncles, aunts, 
nephews, nieces, were so united by common 
sympathies, that good or ill befalling any one 
of them intensely affected the whole connection. 
Mutual support commensurate with the area of 
their location thus became the order among 
these people. At the time of the first deporta- 
tion of Africans to the West Indies to replace 
the aborigines who had been decimated in 
the mines at Santo Domingo and in the pearl 
fisheries of the South Caribbean, the circum- 
stances of the Spanish settlers in the Antilles 
were of singular, even romantic, interest. 

The enthusiasm which overflowed from 
the crusades and the Moorish wars, upon the 
discovery and conquest of America, had occa- 

16 



242 FROUDACITY. 

sioned the peopling of the Western Archi- 
pelago by a race of men in whom the daring 
of freebooters was strangely blended with a 
fierce sort of religiousness. As holders of slaves, 
these men recognized, and endeavoured to 
their best to give effect to, the humane in- 
junctions of Bishop Las Casas. The Negroes, 
therefore, male and female, were promptly 
presented for admission by baptism into the 
Catholic Church, which always had stood open 
and ready to welcome them. The relations 
of god-father and god-mother resulting from 
these baptismal functions had a most important 
bearing on the reciprocal stations of master and 
slave. The god-children were, according to 
ecclesiastical custom, considered in every sense 
entitled to all the protection and assistance 
which were within the competence of the god- 
parents, who, in their turn, received from the 
former the most absolute submission. It is easy 
to see that the planters, as well as those inti- 
mately connected with them, in assuming such 
obligations with their concomitant responsibi- 
lities, practically entered into bonds which they 
all regarded as, if possible, more solemn than 
the natural ties of secular parentage. The duty 



RESUME. 243 

of providing for these dependents usually took 
the shape of their being apprenticed to, and 
trained in the various arts and vocations that 
constitute the life of civilization. In many cases, 
at the death of their patrons, the bondsmen who 
were deemed most worthy were, according to 
the means of the testator, provided for in a 
manner lifting them above the necessity of 
future dependence. Manumission, too, either 
by favour or through purchase, was allowed the 
fullest operation. Here then was the active 
influence of higher motives than mere greed of 
gain or the pride of racial power mellowing the 
lot and gilding the future prospects of the 
dwellers in the tropical house of bondage. 

The next, and even more effectual agency 
in modifying and harmonizing the relations be- 
tween owner and bondspeople was the inevitable 
attraction of one race to the other by the sen- 
timent of natural affection. Out of this sprang 
living ties far more intimate and binding on the 
moral sense than even obligations contracted in 
deference to the Church. Natural impulses 
have often diviner sources than ecclesiastical 
mandates. Obedience to the former not seldom 
brings down the penalties of the Church ; but 



244 FROUDACITY. 

the culprit finds solace in the consciousness 
that the offence might in itself be a protection 
from the thunders it has provoked. Under 
these circumstances the general body of planters, 
who were in the main adventurers of the freest 
type, were fain to establish connections with such 
of the slave-women as attracted their sympathy, 
through personal comeliness or aptitude in 
domestic affairs, or, usually, both combined. 
There was ordinarily in this beginning of the 
seventeenth century no Vashti that needed 
expulsion from the abode of a plantation Aha- 
suerus to make room for the African Esther 
to be admitted to the chief place within 
the portals. One great natural consequence 
of this was the extension to the relatives or 
guardians of the bondswoman so preferred of 
an amount of favour which, in the case of the 
more capable males, completes the parallel we 
have been drawing by securing for each of them 
the precedence and responsibilities of a Mor- 
decai. The offspring of these natural alliances 
came in therefore to cement more intimately 
the union of interests which previous relations 
had generated. Beloved by their fathers, and 
in many cases destined by them to a lot superior 



RESUME. 245 

to that whereto they were entitled by formal 
law and social prescription, these young pro- 
creations — Mulattos, as they were called — 
were made the objects of special and careful 
provisions on the fathers' part. They were, 
according to the means of their fathers in the 
majority of cases, sent for education and 
training to European or other superior insti- 
tutions. After this course they were either 
formally acknowledged by their fathers, or, if 
that was impracticable, amply and suitably 
provided for in a career out of their native 
colony. To a reflecting mind there is some- 
thing that interests, not to say fascinates, in 
studying the action and reaction upon one 
another of circumstances in the existence of 
the Mulatto. As a matter of fact, he had much 
more to complain of under the slave system 
than his pure-blooded African relations. The law, 
by decreeing that every child of a freeman and a 
slave woman must follow the fortune of the womb, 
thus making him the property of his mother 
exclusively, practically robbed him before his 
very birth of the nurture and protection of a 
father. His reputed father had no obligation to 
be even aware of his procreation, and neverthe- 



246 FROUDACITY. 

less — so inscrutable are the ways of Providence ! 
— the Mulatto was the centre around which 
clustered the outraged instincts of nature in 
rebellion against the desecrating mandates that 
prescribed treason to herself. Law and society 
may decree ; but in our normal humanity there 
throbs a sentiment which neutralizes every 
external impulse contrary to its promptings. 

In meditating on the varied history of the 
Negro in the United States, since his first 
landing on the banks of the James River in 
1 6 19 till the Emancipation Act of President 
Lincoln in 1865, it is curious to observe that 
the elevation of the race, though in a great 
measure secured, proceeded from circumstances 
almost the reverse of those that operated so 
favourably in the same direction elsewhere. 
The men of the slave-holding States, chiefly 
Puritans or influenced by Puritanic surround- 
ings, were not under the ecclesiastical sway 
which rendered possible in the West Indies and 
other Catholic countries the establishment of 
the reciprocal bonds of god-parents and god- 
children. The self-same causes operated to 
prevent any large blending of the two races, 
inasmuch as the immigrant from Britain who 



r&sumA 247 

had gone forth from his country to better his 
fortune had not left behind him his attachment 
to the institutions of the mother-land, among 
which marrying, whenever practicable, was one of 
the most cherished. Above all, too, as another 
powerful check at first to such alliances between 
the ruling and servile races of the States, there 
existed the native idiosyncracy of the Anglo- 
Saxon. That class of them who had left 
Britain were likelier than the more refined of 
their nation to exhibit in its crudest and cruellest 
form the innate jealousy and contempt of other 
races that pervades the Anglo-Saxon bosom. It 
is but a simple fact that, whenever he conde- 
scended thereto, familiarity with even the love- 
liest of the subject people was regarded as a 
mighty self-unbending for which the object 
should be correspondingly grateful. So there 
could, in the beginning, be no frequent instances 
of the romantic chivalry that gilded the quasi- 
marital relations of the more fervid and humane 
members of the Latin stock. 

But this kind of intercourse, which in the 
earlier generation was undoubtedly restricted in 
North America by the checks above adverted 
to, and, presumably, also by the mutual unin- 



248 FROUDACITY. 

telligibility in speech, gradually expanded with 
the natural increase of the slave population. 
The American-born, English-speaking Negro 
girl, who had in many cases been the play- 
mate of her owner, was naturally more in- 
telligible, more accessible, more attractive — 
and the inevitable consequence was the ex- 
tension apace of that intercourse, the off- 
spring whereof became at length so visibly 
numerous. 

Among the Romans, the grandest of all 
colonizers, the individual's Civis Romanus sum 
— I am a Roman citizen — was something more 
than verbal vapouring; it was a protective 
talisman— a buckler no less than a sword. 
Yet was the possession of this noble and 
singular privilege no barrier to Roman citizens 
meeting on a broad humanitarian level any 
alien race, either allied to or under the pro- 
tection of that world-famous commonwealth. 
In the speeches of the foremost orators and 
statesmen among the conquerors of the then 
known world, the allusions to subject or allied 
aliens are distinguished by a decorous observ- 
ance of the proprieties which should mark any 
reference to those who had the dignity of Rome's 



R&SUM&. 249 

friendship, or the privilege of her august pro- 
tection. Observations, therefore, regarding in- 
dividuals of rank in these alien countries had 
the same sobriety and deference which marked 
allusions to born Romans of analogous degree. 
Such magnanimity, we grieve to say, is not cha- 
racteristic of the race which now replaces the 
Romans in the colonizing leadership of the world. 
We read with feelings akin to despair of the 
cheap, not to say derogatory, manner in which, 
in both Houses of Parliament, native potentates, 
especially of non- European countries, are fre- 
quently spoken of by the hereditary aristocracy 
and the first gentlemen of the British Empire. 
The inborn racial contempt thus manifested in 
quarters where rigid self-control and decorum 
should form the very essence of normal deport- 
ment, was not likely, as we have before hinted, 
to find any mollifying ingredient in the settlers 
on the banks of the Mississippi. Therefore 
should we not be surprised to find, w T ith regard 
to many an illicit issue of " down South," 
the arrogance of race so overmastering the 
promptings of nature as to render not 
unfrequent at the auction-block the sight of 
many a chattel of mixed blood, the offspring 



250 FROUDACITY. 

of some planter whom business exigency had 
forced to this commercial transaction as the 
readiest mode of self-release. Yet were the 
exceptions to this rule enough to contribute 
appreciably to the weight and influence of the 
mixed race in the North, where education 
and a fair standing had been clandestinely 
secured for their children by parents to whom 
law and society had made it impossible to 
do more, and whom conscience rendered in- 
capable of stopping at less. 

From this comparative sketch of the history 
of the slaves in the States,' in the West Indies 
and countries adjacent, it will be perceived 
that in the latter scenes of bondage everything 
had conspired to render a fusion of interests 
between the ruling and the servile classes not 
only easy, but inevitable. In the very first 
generation after their introduction, the Africans 
began to press upward, a movement which 
every decade has accelerated, in spite of the 
changes which supervened as each of the 
Colonies fell under British sway. Nearly two 
centuries had by this time elapsed, and the 
coloured influence, which had grown with their 
wealth, education, numbers, and unity, though 



RESUME, 251 

circumscribed by the emancipation of the 
slaves, and the consequent depression in for- 
tune of all slave-owners, never was or could 
be annihilated. In the Government service 
there were many for whom the patronage of 
god-parents or the sheer influence of their 
family had effected an entrance. The pre- 
valence and potency of the influences we have 
been dilating upon may be gauged by the fact 
that personages no less exalted than Governors 
of various Colonies — of Trinidad in three au- 
thentic cases — have been sharers in the prevail- 
ing usages, in the matter of standing sponsors 
(by proxy), and also of relaxing in the society 
of some fascinating daughter of the sun from 
the tension and wear of official duty. In the 
three cases just referred to, the most careful 
provision was made for the suitable education 
and starting in life of the issues. For the 
god-children of Governors there were places 
in the public service, and so from the highest 
to the lowest the humanitarian intercourse 
of the classes was confirmed. 

Consequent on the frequent abandonment of 
their plantations by many owners who de- 
spaired of being able to get along by paying 



252 FROUDACITY. 

their way, an opening was made for the in- 
sinuation of Absenteeism into our agricul- 
tural, in short, our economic existence. The 
powerful sugar lords, who had invested largely 
in the cane plantations, were fain to take 
over and cultivate the properties which their 
debtors doggedly refused to continue working, 
under pretext of the entire absence, or at any 
rate unreliability, of labour. The representa- 
tives of those new transatlantic estate proprietors 
displaced, but never could replace, the original 
cultivators, who were mostly gentlemen as 
well as agriculturists. It was from this overseer 
class that the vituperations and slanders went 
forth that soon became stereotyped, concerning 
the Negro's incorrigible laziness and want of 
ambition — those gentry adjusting the scale of 
wages, not according to the importance and 
value of the labour done, but according to the 
scornful estimate which they had formed of the 
Negro personally. And when the wages were 
fixed fairly, they almost invariably sought to in- 
demnify themselves for their enforced justice by 
the insulting license of their tongues, addressed 
to males and females alike. The influence of 
such men on local legislation, in which they 



RESUME. 253 

had a preponderating share, either as actual 
proprietors or as the attorneys of absentees, 
was not in the direction of refinement or 
liberality. Indeed, the kind of laws which 
they enacted, especially during the apprentice- 
ship (1834-8), is thus summarized by one, and 
him an English officer, who was a visitor in 
those agitated days of the Colonies : — 

** It is demonstrated that the laws which were 
to come into operation immediately on expira- 
tion of the apprenticeship are of the most objec- 
tionable character, and fully established the fact 
not only of a future intention to infringe the 
rights of the emancipated classes, but of the 
actual commencement and extensive progress of 
a Colonial system for that purpose. The object 
of the laws is to circumscribe the market for 
free labour — to prohibit the possession or sale 
of ordinary articles of produce on sale, the 
obvious intention of which is to confine the 
emancipated classes to a course of agricultural 
servitude — to give the employers a monopoly of 
labour, and to keep down a free competition for 
wages — to create new and various modes of 
apprenticeship for the purpose of prolonging 
predial service, together with many evils of the 



254 FROUDACITY. 

late system — to introduce unnecessary restraint 
and coercion, the design of which is to create a 
perpetual surveillance over the liberated negroes, 
and to establish a legislative despotism. The 
several laws passed are based upon the most 
vicious principles of legislation, and in their 
operation will be found intolerably oppressive 
and entirely subversive of the just intentions of 
the British Legislature." 

These liberal-souled gentry were, in sooth, 
Mr. Froude's " representatives " of Britain, 
whose traditions steadily followed in their fami- 
lies, he has so well and sympathetically set forth. 

We thus see that the irritation and rancour 
seething in the breast of the new plantocracy, 
of whom the majority was of the type that then 
also flourished in Barbados, Jamaica, and Deme- 
rara, were nourished and kept acute in order to 
crush the African element. Harm was done, cer- 
tainly ; but not to the ruinous extent sometimes 
declared. It was too late for perfect success, as, 
according to the Negroes' own phrase, people 
of colour had by that time already " passed the 
lock-jaw " * stage (at which trifling misadven- 

1 " Yo tt 'ja pass'e mal machoe " — in metaphorical allusion to 
new-born infants who have lived beyond a certain number 
of days. 



RESUME. 255 

tures might have nipped the germ of their pro- 
gress in the bud.) In spite of adverse legisla- 
tion, and in spite of the scandalous subservience 
of certain Governors to the Colonial Legisla- 
tures, the Race can point with thankfulness and 
pride to the visible records of their success 
wherever they have permanently sojourned. 

Primary education of a more general and 
undiscriminating character, especially as to race 
and colour, was secured for the bulk of the 
West Indies by voluntary undertakings, and 
notably through the munificent provision of 
Lady Mico, which extended to the whole of 
the principal islands. 

Thanks to Lord Harris for introducing, and 
to Sir Arthur Gordon for extending to the 
secondary stage, the public education of Trini- 
dad, there has been since Emancipation, that 
is, during the last thirty-seven years, a more 
effective bringing together in public schools of 
various grades, of children of all races and ranks. 
Rivals at home, at school and college, in books 
as well as on the playground, they have very 
frequently gone abroad together to learn the 
professions they have selected. In this way 
there is an intercommunion between all the 



256 FROUDACITY. 

intelligent sections of the inhabitants, based 
on a common training and the subtle sym- 
pathies usually generated in enlightened breasts 
by intimate personal knowledge. In mixed 
communities thus circumstanced, there is no 
possibility of maintaining distinctions based on 
mere colour, as advocated by Mr. Froude. 

The following brief summary by the Rev. P. 
H. Doughlin, Rector of St. Clement's, Trinidad, 
a brilliant star among the sons of Ham, embodies 
this fact in language which, so far as it goes, 
is as comprehensive as it is weighty : — 

" Who could, without seeming to insult the 
intelligence of men, have predicted on the day 
of Emancipation that the Negroes then re- 
leased from the blight and withering influence 
of ten generations of cruel bondage, so weak- 
ened and half-destroyed — so denationalized and 
demoralized — so despoiled and naked, would be 
in the position they are now ? In spite of the 
proud, supercilious, and dictatorial bearing of 
their teachers, in spite of the hampering of un- 
sympethetic, alien oversight, in spite of the spirit 
of dependence and servility engendered by 
slavery, not only have individual members of 
the race entered into all the offices of dignity in 



RESUME. 257 

Church and State, as subalterns — as hewers of 
wood and drawers of water — but they have at- 
tained to the very highest places. Here in the 
West Indies, and on the West Coast of Africa, 
are to be found Surgeons of the Negro Race, 
Solicitors, Barristers, Mayors, Councillors, Prin- 
cipals and Founders of High Schools and Col- 
leges, Editors and Proprietors of Newspapers, 
Archdeacons, Bishops, Judges, and Authors 
— men who not only teach those immedi- 
ately around them, but also teach the world. 
Members of the race have even been entrusted 
with the administration of Governments. And 
it is not mere commonplace men that the Negro 
Race has produced. Not only have the British 
Universities thought them worthy of their 
honorary degrees and conferred them on them, 
but members of the race have won these Uni- 
versity degrees. A few years back a full-blooded 
Negro took the highest degree Oxford has to 
give to a young man. The European world is 
looking with wonder and admiration at the 
progress made by the Negro Race — a progress 
unparalleled in the annals of the history of 
any race." 

To this we may add that in the domain 
17 



258 FROUDACITY. 

of high literature the Blacks of the United 
States, for the twenty-five years of social eman- 
cipation, and despite the lingering obstructions 
of caste prejudice, have positively achieved 
wonders. Leaving aside the writings of men 
of such high calibre as F. Douglass, Dr. Hyland 
Garnet, Prof. Crummell, Prof, E. Blyden, Dr. 
Tanner, and others, it is gratifying to be able 
to chronicle the Ethiopic women of North 
America as moving shoulder to shoulder with 
the men in the highest spheres of literary 
activity. Among a brilliant band of these our 
sisters, conspicuous no less in poetry than in 
prose, we single out but a solitary name for 
the double purpose of preserving brevity and 
of giving in one embodiment the ideal Afro- 
American woman of letters. The allusion here 
can scarcely fail to point to Mrs. S. Harper. 
This lady's philosophical subtlety of reasoning 
on grave questions finds effective expression in 
a prose of singular precision and vigour. But it 
is as a poet that posterity will hail her in the 
coming ages of our Race.. For pathos, depth 
of spiritual insight, and magical exercise of a 
rare pow T er of self-utterance, it will hardly be 
questioned that she has surpassed every com- 



RESUME. 259 

petitor among females — white or black — save 
and except Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with 
whom the gifted African stands on much the 
same plane of poetic excellence. 

The above summary of our past vicissitudes 
and actual position shows that there is nothing 
in our political circumstances to occasion un- 
easiness. The miserable skin and race doc- 
trine we have been discussing does not at all 
prefigure the destinies at all events of the 
West Indies, or determine the motives that 
will affect them. With the exception of those 
belonging to the Southern States of the Union, 
the vast body of African descendants now 
dispersed in various countries of the Western 
Hemisphere are at sufficient peace to begin 
occupying themselves, according to some fixed 
programme, about matters of racial importance. 
More than ten millions of Africans are scattered 
over the wide area indicated, and possess 
amongst them instances of mental and other 
qualifications which render them remarkable 
among their fellow-men. But like the essential 
parts of a complicated albeit perfect machine, 
these attainments and qualifications so widely 
dispersed await, it is evident, some potential 



260 FROUDACITY. 

agency to collect and adjust them into the vast 
engine essential for executing the true purposes 
of the civilized African Race. Already, espe- 
cially since the late Emancipation Jubilee, are 
signs manifest of a desire for intercommunion 
and intercomprehension amongst the more 
distinguished of our people. With intercourse 
and unity of purpose will be secured the means 
to carry out the obvious duties which are sure 
to devolve upon us, especially with reference to 
the cradle of our Race, which is most probably 
destined to be the ultimate resting-place and 
headquarters of millions of our posterity. 
Within the short time that we had to compass 
all that we have achieved, there could not have 
arisen opportunities for doing more than we 
have effected. Meanwhile our present device 
is : " Work, Hope, and Wait ! " 

Finally, it must be borne in mind that the 
abolition of physical bondage did not "by any 
means secure all the requisite conditions of 
" a fair field and no favour " for the future 
career of the freedmen. The remnant of Jacob, 
on their return from the Captivity, were com- 
pelled, whilst rebuilding their Temple, literally 
to labour with the working tool in one hand 



R&SUME. 261 

and the sword for personal defence in the other. 
Even so have the conditions, figuratively, 
presented themselves under which the Blacks 
have been obliged to rear the fabric of self- 
elevation since 1838, whilst combating cease- 
lessly the obstacles opposed to the realizing 
of their legitimate aspirations. Mental and, 
in many cases, material success has been gained, 
but the machinery for accumulating and apply- 
ing the means required for comprehensive 
racial enterprises is waiting on Providence, 
time, and circumstances for its establishment 
and successful working. 



UNWIN BROTHERS, THE GRESHAM PRESS, CHILWORTH AND LONDON. 



